Obama Loving Soccer Moms Are Against Torture! … (but what if their kid’s life was on the line??)
I watched “Taken” with my wife last night. The story line, if you haven’t seen this movie, goes like this;
Liam Neeson, a retired government agent, is the ex husband of Lenore who has remarried an evidently fabulously wealthy man who has in turn given his step daughter everything Neesom has been unable to. The somewhat spoiled 17 year old daughter wants to go to Europe for the summer with her 19 year old girlfriend to follow U2.
She secured her father’s permission under three conditions. Namely, that he is told where and with whom she is staying at all times, and that she calls him every night.
In order to get everything into a 90 minute movie the first 30 minutes covers a lot of territory. No sooner are the girls dropped off by a young man (he’s in on the scheme) they met at the airport than a group of Albanian thugs show up and kidnap them. They do this while Neeson is on the phone with his daughter. He is able to record the call and have his buddies in the government analyze the tape. He heads off for Paris.
After assessing the situation the action begins.
I don’t want to give away the whole story. I’m looking to make a point. This movie can be used as an analogy. Early on in the movie Neeson finds out that his daughter was taken, not for ransom, but, for the white slave sex trade. He also finds out that the chances of finding her after 96 hours are all but nil.
Neeson decides that he will do anything he has to in order to save his daughter. He will use all of his skills to find his daughter. He will beat, kill, torture, and lie among other things to save her from those who will sell her and those who will rape her until they tire of her and then most surely kill her.
So on to the analogy. You know that a terrorist attack in being planned for four days from now. If you don’t stop it by then, it will happen and people will die (perhaps your own children and retainly someone’s children) What do you do? To what actions will you resort?
Don’t even think about the analogy. Put yourself into the shoes of Neeson, or of his ex-wife who simply says “bring my baby back.”
The point of this post is simple. Are the actions taken by Neeson’s character so out of line? Is there anyone who would not take the same action’s were it their child?
Is it that far of a stretch to understand? Is it that far of a stretch to understand the mildly uncomfortable steps taken by our government constitutes nothing close to torture? If that is all our trained intelligence organizations need to do to get vital information shouldn’t we be congratulating them for their restraint?
Our contemporary American culture is made up today of millions of mothers who sacrifice everything, sometimes even common sense to “protect” their children. They do so sometimes, when there is no danger, to the detriment of those children.
But in our world the danger is real. Thousands are being brainwashed into believing that the way to paradise is by killing the non-believer. I think our policy toward the terrorists who are trying to kill us should be something like this: What would (or should) a parent do?
