Here’s why I don’t care that al-Qaeda operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded after Sept. 11, 2001: I remember where I was the day before.
Every American who recalls that day can probably remember where he or she was when those jets hit the World Trade Center. I do too. But I remember where I was on Sept. 10, 2001, at about the same time.
In the lowest level of the World Trade Center, getting off a commuter train from Jersey City, N.J. I had an appointment in midtown-Manhattan and had to take a subway train from the WTC. Had I done that a day later, I’d have arrived at the WTC at just about the time the first or second jet hit.
But what if I had arrived maybe 15 minutes earlier and had some time to kill? What if I’d decided I wanted to go to the top of the WTC and take in the view?
Then I’d have been one of those people who were trapped above the inferno that raged below them, terrified, wondering how or if we could ever escape. I’d have experienced the terror they felt as the WTC Twin Towers collapsed beneath them and sent them to their horrible deaths.
And you sure as heck wouldn’t be reading this column. Yes, I came that close to perhaps being among the WTC casualties of Sept. 11.
So when President Obama declassified Justice Department memos that revealed the waterboarding of Mohammed and Zubaydah, perhaps you can forgive me if the knowledge didn’t exactly leave me prostrate with grief. Nor am I feeling the arguments of those
who claim how torture violates our principles and destroys our values.
Does it, really? We were in a war against terrorists. War is called war for a reason. It’s because nasty things get done in a war, lots of them. The Allies killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians in bombing raids during World War II. Should we have NOT bombed Germany and Japan because killing civilians violates our principles and destroys our values?
Or does torture violate our principles and destroy our values while wholesale killing of civilians is acceptable?
Several books have hit the market in the last few years about the plight of German civilians during World War II. Some tell the story of their fate during the bombing raids. At least one claims that some two million German civilians died during the Allied occupation of Germany. And of course, for decades, we’ve had the handwringing and whining about what we did to the Japanese with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As for the latter event, it occurs to me that there were exactly 1,337 days from Dec. 8, 1941 up to Aug. 5, 1945 – the day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Japanese government could have surrendered – and surrendered unconditionally – on any one of them.
As for the plight of the Germans, which applies to the Japanese as well, I invoke that great black American adage that goes like this:
Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing.
That saying has been around Afro-Americana for decades. It basically means this: if you don’t want to suffer the consequences of starting some trouble, then don’t start any trouble.
Perhaps Obama, instead of piously intoning that America “does not torture,” should instead tell the world, specifically terrorists, that from now on the nation will invoke the great African-American Prime Directive of “Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing.” Because once you start something, then anything goes.
So from now on, we won’t have to fret when guys like Mohammed and Zubaydah get waterboarded. After all, they would have been warned in advance. (And won’t someone point out that Mohammed and Zubaydah got off a lot easier than those poor souls trapped in the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001?)
If we don’t want to go with the Great African-American Prime Directive, perhaps we can go with one less known. I can’t recall who said it or where I read it, but it goes something like this:
If it’s worth fighting for, it’s worth fighting dirty for.
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is an award-winning journalist who lives in Baltimore.
