about the universe forum commander Shop Now Commanders Circle
Product List FAQs home Links Contact Us

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Beware the Disengenuous

This is Steven Petrick writing.

Let me preface this by noting that this problem is not limited to one party, I am only using this as a recent example of the problem.

Senator Kennedy has announced that the U.S. imprisoned a Japanese Soldier for 15 years for "waterboarding". This was all he had to say about the man, and thus it stands as a loud and vigorous condemnation of the U.S. for our "double standard", that we would imprison someone for this and use it ourselves.

The thing is, if you actually went to Google, entered the man's name and the word "torture", you would find that he was not imprisoned for the stated crime. The charges under which he was tried were:

Striking prisoners with his open hand.

Striking prisoners with his closed fist.

Kicking prisoners.

Striking prisoners with a club.

Burning prisoners with cigarettes.

Water Torture.

Strapping prisoners to a stretcher and suspending them upside down.

Stealing Red Cross supplies.

The charges did not combine the use of stretcher and "water torture" as Kennedy did, but I will assume that one of his aids researched the matter and determined that it was so. The obverse would be to assume that no research was done and the water torture actually bore no similarity to waterboarding.

Further it should be noted that the actions of this man were not done for the purposes of gaining information, but simply reflected both his own personal saddism and the general saddism towards non-Japanese that was endemic in Japan's military in that time period.

Thus Kennedy is saying that none of the other charges against the man mattered, and his sentence was only about his use of waterboarding, something that he may not have actually employed.

But it makes good political theater even if it is, at best, a half truth (saying that his imprisonment was only about waterboarding). But, in essence, Kennedy is implying that burning men with cigarettes and beating them with clubs, both far more likely to produce permanent physical harm, are far less serious than waterboarding.

Sadly, we have to watch all of our political leaders (whether Republican, Democrat, or Independent, or some other party) as they all depend on us not to look too closely at their words and the "facts" they present to us to support their views. And sadly, we cannot depend on the media to do "due diligence", or no paper or newscast would have reported Kennedy's words without itself having first researched his "facts" to see if he was playing fast and loose and reported those facts alongside the Senator's words.