News My Way

The Bush administration has recently told a federal judge that CIA’s interrogation methods utilized against suspected terrorists in secret CIA prisons should not be revealed.  Any information on their alternative interrogation methods could be reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage, the government’s court filings said.  The government’s reasoning was that any potential information on interrogation could be used by terrorists for their anti-interrogation training and could reveal the U.S. counter-terrorism strategies.

Let’s chew on this a little.  First of all, the U.S. government, ”the defender of the freedom and democracy of the world”, is utilizing ”alternative interrogation methods”, a.k.a. torture, to get information out of terrorists.  I cannot deny that it is absolutely critical to gather the necessary intelligence to prevent any acts of terrorism in our country.  However, we cannnot use any barbaric methods in doing so, as a civilized society.  Maybe I am contradicting myself here, but how contradicting is our government?  When we went to a war against Iraq, the main reason behind the invasion was WMD.  Then it conveniently changed to removal of the dictator who massacred and tortured tens of thousands of Iraqi people.  Wait a minute…  The dictator who tortured people…  So I guess it is unacceptable and abominable for Hussein to torture his people, but it is noble or even patriotic to torture terrorists…  Further, how about the possibility of innocent people being detained in the secret prisons?  Do they really need to indure torture by the U.S. government only to be dumped on the side of street after the U.S. government finds out they had nothing to do with terrorists?  It is wildly publicized when we find any shred of information from detained terrorists, but it is always kept quiet when innocent victims were captured, tortured, and released with no charges.  The U.S. government never apologized to people who were wrongfully detained in such facilities.  Some people might say it is necessary to keep this country safe.  What is this country?  Its land?  Its resources?  Its power.  The country cannot be formed without its people.   In the past, we did detain some U.S. citizens for a possible relation to terrorists without warrants.  They were U.S. citizens who just happened to be Muslim.  So it is okay to detain Muslim U.S. citizen anytime if you think they are terrorists without any warrant?  What if 9-11 was coordinated by North Korea?  Are we going to start randomly detaining Korean-Americans to gather intelligence on terrorists?  Wait, that sounds strangely familiar…  Oh, I remember.  We did exactly the same thing to our own citizens during the World War II.  On December 7th, 1941, local authoritites and the FBI rounded up the Japanese-American leaders in Hawaii and the U.S. continent following the attack on Pearl Harbor.  By 6:30 am the following morning, 736 Japanese-Americans were in custody; within 48 hours, the number increased to 1291.  Most people were detained under no formal charges, and family members were forbidden from seeing them.  We called it the enemy alien internment camps, and our own Justice Department set them up.   Someone once said that what we learn from history is that we never learn from history…

We self-proclaimed that we are the defender of freedom and democracy.  Are we really?  We torture people who came to us to fulfill their American dreams, own the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons while we tell others they can’t have them, and spy on and lie to our own citizens.

At the same time, however, I truly believe in the greatness of this nation.  In the modern history of mankind, I do not recall a country with many different races residing in a relative harmony like ours.  The U.S. is practically built by immigrants.  Every single immigrant from different countries brings something unique and positive things to this country, which make our country even greater.  If some politicians cannot see this great aspect of our country and keep committing these acts of injustice, maybe it is time for us to stop letting them represent us because they certainly do not represent my beliefs.