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Yet
Another Victory for Bin Laden
by Rev. Dr. Tom Thresher
Over the past few days President Bush has
declared repeatedly that “we do not torture.” Yet his
words ring hollow in light of recent reports of secret
CIA prison camps and Vice President Cheney’s active
opposition to the Senate bill that expressly prohibits
the use of torture.
With the President’s assertion that we
must be able to use whatever means necessary to extract
information to protect us from terrorists, I wonder what
price we are paying for our imagined safety. When more
than 2,000 American service men and women have been
killed in Iraq, when upwards of 15,000 have been injured
(many loosing arms and legs), when we appear to have
killed more Iraqis in a few years of war than Saddam
killed in his 20 years in power, we must ask, who needs
to be protected from whom?
We all remember the images of September
11 when Al Qaeda terrorists flew passenger jets into the
twin towers and the Pentagon. Bin Laden won his first
victory over the United States on September 12th
when we declared “business as usual” rather than a
national day of mourning. Bin Laden has continued to
win victory after victory over this nation as we have
succumbed to fear and retribution, with the Patriot
Acts, heightened alerts, and our first ever preemptive
war. We have fantasized that we can build walls
strong enough to protect ourselves from determined and
desperate people, but who would have imagined that men
with box knives could have brought down the twin towers?
The latest Al Qaeda victory comes with
the administration’s desire to exempt the CIA from the
use of torture for suspected terrorists. This victory
cuts very close to our souls. Will we be beheading
terrorists on TV in the near future? If we become as
ruthless as the terrorists, what will we have gained?
It is time to actually defeat Bin Laden
and Al Qaeda, not with guns and torture, but with
fearlessness and principle. It is time to live up to
the words of the founding document of this nation: that
we are all endowed with “certain unalienable rights.” It
is time that we show the world that this sentiment
applies not just to Americans, but even to those whom we
believe would like to harm us.
I applaud the efforts of the Senate to
redirect our actions by disavowing torture. It is a
small, but essential, step. Let it be the first of many
steps in recapturing our moral and ethical leadership in
the world.
