"Investigating the Interrogators"

On the Los Angeles Times website, I read a political editorial about the CIA’s interrogating techniques used under the presidency of George W. Bush. As stated by “Investigating the Interrogators”, “One of the most shameful chapters in the war against terrorism was the complicity of George W. Bush's Justice Department in the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" — in plain language, torture — to extract information from suspected terrorists”. The author includes evidence of the "torture" in the form of listing the acts of interrogation, such as facial slaps, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and solitary confinement, and claimed that interrogators went further than authorized. The author's intended audience would consist of sympathetic readers, with extremely anti-violence ideologies.

While scanning different newspaper editorials and commentaries, and trying to find one that would be suitable for this assignment, this editorial really stood out to me. In the required class reading, one of the chapters in the textbook discusses how the media is always trying to find the negative side of every situation. No matter what the government does, they will only look for what the government has done wrong, because that makes politics much more exciting. I feel like this article is a good example of that statement. No matter what the CIA and former president George W. Bush did in the war against terrorism, the media would find a way to criticize it. If the government didn’t have an active role in fighting terrorism, the media would claim that they were not working hard to protect the citizens of our country; instead, they are fiercely interrogating suspected terrorists, and yet they are still being attacked by the media. Like it or not, we are at war, and such measures have to be taken. The CIA would not be interrogating someone who they had a right to believe was completely innocent. These people are not innocent, and what we do to these select few, for example, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man that was allegedly behind 9/11, is absolutely nothing compared to what they do to innocent civilians every day. I think that it is time for the media and U.S. citizens to realize that there is no such thing as a ‘nice war’, and that desperate times call for desperate measures. We have to trust our government to take significant actions in order to fight the war against terrorism, and stop only searching for negative things to say about the government.