Torturing for Freedom

The first thing I saw upon logging into LinkedIn was an old video of an ISIS operative gloating about the number of people he had killed and the women he had raped, followed by the usual chorus of comments about Muslims being terrorists and the inherent evil of Islam. As an atheist and no apologist for the faith—or any other—I acknowledge that this monster may be real, but could just as easily be another propaganda tool playing a role. What struck me, however, was how none of the commenters seemed remotely interested in digging deeper into the murky origins of ISIS—how it was propped up, armed, and financed as a counterweight to Iraqi Shia militias. No mention of the Western nation and its vassals responsible for the carnage and chaos in the Middle East, their infamous torture school (renamed but still operating), their illegal prison camp in Cuba, or the secret black sites scattered across the world. Moreover, if we were to stack every Islamic terrorist atrocities against those committed by Christian white nations—their world wars, colonial slaughters, neo-colonial bloodbaths, South East Asian massacres, Middle Eastern invasions, brutal crackdowns on their own citizens—the so-called Islamic terrorists wouldn’t even rank-Babies.

I once knew a man who had his testicles electrocuted for a week—his only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a village wedding photographer mistaken for an insurgent because he looked "Mongoloid" enough for the army to pick him up. I met another who had cigarette burns covering his back, courtesy of his time in police custody. Then there was the time I got drunk with a Buddhist monk, only to later learn he had spent nearly seven years in solitary confinement in a Tibetan prison. I’ve heard senior police officers boast about how they battered people in custody, and I once drank chai with a BSF sub-inspector who casually used the word “torture” in place of “interrogation.”

Already aware that most criminals don’t regret their actions in the least—at most, they fear human revenge or divine retribution—I once spent weeks scouring the web for scholarly and general articles on whether torturers employed by government agencies—police, military interrogators, intelligence spooks like those in the CIA or KGB—ever express genuine remorse. What I found was damning. The subject has been virtually untouched in academic research. And from the scarce evidence available—confessions of war criminals, testimonies from ex-operatives—the results were abysmal. The only ones who ever expressed regret—whether for torture, battery, or gang rape, all carried out in service of their nation and to protect our freedom—were those who had been publicly exposed or were hoping for a reduced sentence.
Most simply rationalize their actions, deny or defend them when confronted, and later shove it all into some dark, locked compartment at the back of their minds.

Coming back to the commenters on the ISIS video post—most aren't bothered about the 40,000 dead in Gaza, a million in Ukraine, or the over 1,000 Alawites massacred last week. Well, unless the mass or social media tells them to be. We humans have a way of keeping our biases intact and treating morality as nothing more than an arbitrary principle—weaponized or discarded as deemed convenient.

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