The four terrorists that were caught fleeing to Ukraine after carrying out Friday night’s terrorist attack at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall appeared in court battered and bruised. Footage earlier circulated on social media showing one of them face down on the ground with his hair pulled, another with his eye popped out of its socket, the other with his ear being stuffed into his mouth, and the final one having his genitals shocked. This led to condemnation from the Mainstream and Alternative Media Community (AMC) alike.
The first sought to fearmonger that the FSB published this footage in order to intimidate their compatriots while a prominent member of the second who was recently in Moscow for a major event lambasted these tough tactics as “medieval” and “a breakdown in the chain of command”. Other members of the AMC condemned torture in general, with the timing of their posts hinting that they’re connected to that footage but that they feel uncomfortable directly addressing it for whatever reason.
The Mainstream Media obviously has ulterior motives in pushing the narrative that they did while the AMC’s are well-intentioned but arguably misguided for the reasons that’ll now be explained. It’s understandable that those activists, commentators, pundits, etc. who are against what the US did in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib and continues to do in Guantanamo Bay would disavow what they truly believe to be the similar tactics that Russia employed against the four captured terrorists.
This is especially so for those who’ve raised awareness of Israel’s abuses against the Palestinians over the years. These members of the AMC might either truly be against the use of any force against detainees for any reason no matter the context, whether out of principle or because they’re concerned that it could discredit whatever they reveal, or they’re worried that they themselves would be discredited if they support it in the Russian case after condemning it in the aforementioned three cases.
Whatever their reasons may be, those that are concerned about double standards have nothing to worry about because the Russian case is qualitatively different from the Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Israeli ones. Those three were mostly against random Iraqis, Muslims from the Global South, and Palestinians who in the vast majority of instances wouldn’t realistically have information about potentially imminent terrorist attacks unlike the four terrorists that Russia captured last weekend.
In other words, the suspects against whom these tough tactics were infamously applied in those three cases were mostly victims of sadists, who literally tortured them for personal or political reasons. The Russian case, however, was all about attempting to obtain information as soon as possible about potentially imminent terrorist attacks seeing as how such could have planned as immediate follow-ups to the Crocus City Hall one as part of a nationwide Hybrid War campaign against Russia.
Security services all across the world have an obligation to employ all means at their disposal if they sincerely believe that there are legitimate reasons to suspect that those in their custody might have information that could thwart a potentially imminent terrorist attack against civilians. To be sure, there are those that sometimes abuse this obligation for sadistic personal or political reasons, and others are sometimes so brainwashed by liberal-globalist ideals that they voluntarily refuse to utilize tough tactics.
Both discredit those of their counterparts who employ these means for the greater good of protecting people from potentially imminent terrorist attacks: the first’s abuses make some suspect that this is always done for sadistic reasons, while the second’s reluctance makes them think that it’s never needed. The reality is that this is sometimes required no matter how much some well-intentioned members of the AMC might be opposed to it, and Russia’s utilization of these tough tactics was for the right reasons.
