A Strange Country

The photos are truly disgusting. No matter if they are from the US or Turkey, such torturers lack a proper sense of humanity. Such reactions from our officials, politicians and the nation should please us, and they do. However, there’s a great contradiction here. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. ‘These pictures are disgusting and make me feel ashamed as a US citizen,’ one US diplomat told me yesterday. ‘If this is what we do, what have we got to offer to the world? These torturers aren’t aware of the damage they did to our flag and our nation. So we must punish them to satisfy the nation’s conscience. Not only others, but the American people want this as well.’

However, he didn’t hide his anger at Turkey’s ‘moral outrage’ against the US over this torture. Complaining about Turks’ ‘double standards,’ he said, ‘With such outrage, one would think that Turkey is completely innocent. What Turkish leader owned up to the torture, as President George W. Bush did, and said that such people blackened the name of your country? What government minister of yours was obliged to face the representatives of the nation like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did?’ Then I suddenly remembered the torturers who had stayed hidden for years, the courts which didn’t give them the punishment they deserved, and dirty bloody campaigns against human rights campaigners. Then I thought, ‘Our country is really strange. Who do we think we’re fooling’?”