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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Torture is
in the eye of
the beheaderTorture is getting a bad name. We live in a time when we are supposed to be respectful of other people's customs and traditions, and yet one of the most culturally entrenched practices in world history -- the torture of one human being by another -- is suddenly seen as outrageous.
The so-called torture by American soldiers of terrorists, criminals and serial jaywalkers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq dominated cable news shows for months, mainly because Midwestern TV anchors finally found a couple of Middle Eastern words they could pronounce. "Abu Ghraib" looks like a mouthful, but it turns out it's simply pronounced "abu grab," as in, "see that guy over there, Abu? Grab him. And put some women's panties on his head."
Abu Grab, Abu Grab, Abu Grab ... frankly, I'm sick of hearing it. I wish they'd go back to trying to pronounce Qatar, that charming little police state that is home to both the U.S. Central Command and the "must-see terror" TV station al-Jazeera, featuring zany "Andy Griffith" reruns along with the occasional beheadings of Americans.
American broadcasters pronounced Qatar "kay-tar," "kway-ter," "cater" and "gater" before being told by locals it was the ironic "cutter." That was just too much for Yankee journalists who finally just said the hell with it and never mentioned the country again. "Torture?" CNN's Wolf Blitzer might have said. "I'll tell you what's torture, trying to pronounce 'Sulaymaniyah.' Why can't we ever invade a country that knows how to spell?"
WHICH GETS US back to our subject: What is torture, and why is it so unpopular today?
While everyone seems to focus on the bad effects of torture (i.e., what it does to those on the receiving end), very little is said about the therapeutic effects of torture on those who apply it. Saddam's son Uday, head of the Ministry of Torture, seemed like a pretty relaxed fella.
I think the reason the world was shocked at the American "torture" of Iraqi prisoners is that we are so bad at it. There's a real "torture gap" between America and the Middle East, where the culture of torture not only has been preserved, but fine-tuned. We think putting women's panties on a prisoner's head is torture, while most of your psychopathic Arab terrorists consider lopping the head off entirely more effective. We can't keep up with these people in the torture game. They're thousands of years "a-head" of us, so to speak.
If the purpose of torture is to make someone unhappy to the point of confessing bad deeds, America should consider substituting humiliation and pain with Western entertainment during interrogation. I suspect an Arab terrorist hearing Madonna's new fake British accent all day long would cause him to cough up the entire al-Qaida organization. I heard her for only a few minutes the other day and prayed for someone to pull my fingernails out and apply electrodes to my more sensitive appendages.
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Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com