Live executions make us no different than the terrorists we hate

In 2004, when I was a Marine recruit in Parris Island, our drill instructors bought out a laptop and made us sit in a school circle around it on the quarterdeck. They showed us a video of a man in an orange jumpsuit who was kneeling in front of hooded men wearing black.

One of them read out a statement and then proceeded to cut the head off of the prisoner. The prisoner’s name was Nick Berg, and his executioner was terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi. It was horrific to watch.

I wondered why in God’s name would they show us this. Our senior drill instructor told us it was revenge for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and that we should expect more such videos. He also said that this is what separates us from them. We are in the business of killing, but we would never be so barbaric.

Those words stuck with me, because he was wrong. Since 9/11 and because of 9/11 we have regressed our society because of a fear of terrorism — a fear that our politicians really want us to feel at all times.

We convinced ourselves we needed to torture prisoners, even when U.S. veterans like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told us it was against our values. He said, “… the torture of prisoners, hurt us a great deal and did provide a propaganda tool for our enemy, including al Qaeda.”

We ignored him and kept doing it. We decided to have secret prisons around the world, away from our legal system, because we worried our legal system would work the way it was supposed to.

We convinced ourselves to accept mass surveillance and........

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