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It is amazing to think that we, the people of the United States, have come to accept torture.  I know, I know, we protest it and shake our hands, but, truth be told, we have come to accept it.

Around the time the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, I happened to have been tricked into an interview with a right-wing, Black radio talk-show program.  In the course of the interview, we discussed Abu Ghraib and torture.  The interviewer took the position that torture, along with the illegal detainment of prisoners at Guantanomo, was permissible because, after all, the terrorists do not abide by the Geneva Convention.

At that moment I understood how easy it had become to justify torture.  All that one needs to do is to play into the fears of the public and the demonization of the alleged enemy.  At that point, particularly when facing an unconventional enemy — as opposed to a formal, enemy nation’s military — all bets are off.  Anything can be done in the name of safety.

To better understand this, however, one should look outside the USA to the experience of Nazi Germany.  Let me call your attention to an outstanding HBO film called Conspiracy.  Starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci, the film focuses on the infamous Wannsee Conference held in 1942, when the Nazis formally decided on the Final Solution to eliminate Jews.  From the standpoint of cinema, what is so striking about this film is the tension that is built up and yet there are no traditional action sequences.  What is relevant for the purposes of our discussion, however, is that the decision to go forward with the wholesale annihilation of an entire people was done in calm and as if it were nothing more than a business decision.  There was little ranting and raving.  Rather, the Jews were simply defined by the Nazis as an evil menace, and the meeting proceeded to consider how best to handle this menace.  The ominous barbarism of these well-dressed, business-like Nazis, hid just beneath the surface.

What we are experiencing today is not altogether different.  While only a few of the most right-wing nutcases contemplate the actual annihilation of Arabs and Muslims, Arabs and Muslims have, in fact, been demonized beyond the point of recognition.  Government officials calmly suggest the potential for ever more serious terrorist attacks against the USA by Al Qaeda, et. al., while we watch the carnage in Iraq (though little attention is given to the criminality involved in the US actually invading that country).  No one knows who the “enemy” actually is, and we are reminded that time is of the essence.

The torturers and those ordering it do not have to have a crazed look in their eyes.  They can look as composed as someone preparing to make a business deal or a meteorologist warning us of a pending snowstorm.  Yet in that cold and considered manner, the hideousness and immorality of torture is ignored, if not actively dismissed.  Those who have apprehension regarding the steps taken in the name of stopping terrorism are treated as if they are weak or unconcerned for the safety of the public.  Recalling the history of international laws and regulations against the use of torture, including the use of torture against US troops in past wars, is dismissed as irrelevant because, after all, we are in a new century facing a new, faceless [although Arab and/or Muslim] enemy.

And so, we go to sleep and awaken each day complicit in an international crime.  We go to work and send our children to school while shaking our heads about how things could have gotten to this point.  Yet in the name of security and our own fears concerning an “enemy,” we barely understand; we remain quiet and accept our own dehumanization in the name of a so-called war against terrorism.

How many of us would have thought that a nation that decried the failure of Imperial Japan to sign and acknowledge the Geneva Conventions concerning the treatment of prisoners (and then proceeded to deprive and torture Allied prisoners of war during World War II), could so easily perpetrate its own sets of crimes in the name of freedom?

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is Executive Editor of the Black Commentator.  He is also a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.