'But That Would Be Torture!'

By Dave Lindorff

I just received an object lesson into how easily we Americans are able to compartmentalize our principles and our sense of basic human decency.

My father, David Lindorff Sr., who is 89 (and an occasional contributor to ThisCantBeHappening!), recently took a bad fall, hitting the back of his head on the bedpost and suffering a concussion that has temporarily left him with some periods of confusion. In the rehab facility where he was recovering, he would sometimes, when he was tired and half-asleep, get confused about his location, and would try to climb out of the hospital bed he was in, putting him at risk of another serious fall. 

I asked the nurse in charge of the floor, and later the head of the facility, if he could perhaps have a belt placed over him so that he would not be able to inadvertently hurt himself, and in both cases received a shocked reply: “We do not restrain our patients here. That would be a kind of torture! We are a restraint-free institution.”

The revulsion in the director’s voice at the notion of even gently restraining a patient like dad in a bed for his own protection was so evident I was struck by its basic sincerity.  

And yet, this is in a country where most of the citizenry is cheering the ongoing torture of captives in the government’s trumped-up “war” on terror. A country that also routinely--and again with the enthusiastic endorsement of the public--tortures many of the millions of human beings it incarcerates every year.

How can it be that there is such widespread empathy in America for the old and the sick and such revulsion at the idea of restraining them (even for their own good), and yet when it comes to people considered to be “terrorists” -- even before these victims have had a trial -- or people who have been jailed, even for non-violent crimes, many of the same people are happy to see them water-boarded, hung by the wrists from the ceiling with only their toes on the ground, placed for hours in stress positions, slammed against the wall, deprived of sleep for days on end, or in the case of common prisoners, placed in solitary, sometimes for months at a stretch, and shackled like slaves when removed from their cells?...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1073