The United States of Torture
So, it’s official. We’re a nation that tortures. The so-called compromise between Bush and McCain, et al, is that Bush will continue to violate the Geneva Conventions and Congress will look the other way.
As eRobin at the American Street says:
Now the debate seems to be over. Barring a filibuster of the Great Torture Compromise, which, like Digby, I think is simply not going to happen, state-sanctioned torture will become the official policy of the United States of America. When we vote, we will be voting in support of torture. When we recite the pledge, we will be pledging our allegiance to waterboarding and other, undisclosed torture techniques. When we pay our taxes, we will be paying for torture. When our children, God, our poor children, write essays in praise of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, they will be writing in praise of torture.
How does it feel?
21 Responses to “The United States of Torture”
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Infidel says:
We must all pretend now that we know nothing. If we know nothing we need not fear someone torturing us to find out what we know. Better yet we shouldn’t pretend- we should really really try real hard really not to know something.
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:11 pm EST -
richard cherry says:
A) How does it feel? – Hurst I would imagine, but I believe that’s the point.
B) American children writing in praise of freedom etc – assuming you suddenly develop an education system that allows them to learn to write.
C) We must all pretend we know nothing (Infidel) – can’t be that hard; just watch the president.I grow ever more in love with Britain by the day – the land of the free morning after pill has something to be said for it after all.
And cricket. -
Paul Tergeist says:
While everyone was looking the other way, the war with Iran looks like it’s going ahead as planned.
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richard cherry says:
aren’t they err islams, though?
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Violet says:
I want to leave. I don’t want to be an American anymore.
Hey Richard, are my comments on your blog still in moderation, or did they get swallowed up by the cyber gods? Not that I said anything worthwhile; just wondering.
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richard cherry says:
whoops sorry, Violet – as Bob would never have said ‘All is revealed’ at my blog now – I was too stupid to realise there were a pile of comments in the swamp that is moderation. Apologies and my thanks for caring. I sincerely hope you will be my first trans-atlantic winner.
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Paul Tergeist says:
I want to leave. I don’t want to be an American anymore.
VSThae problem is that since you ARE an American there is no place left that will have you. I doubt you can even get into Canada.
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gordo says:
I think it’s about time that “mainstream” America woke up to the fact that almost half of their fellow countrymen would happily impose an autocratic state on people that they don’t consider to be “real” Americans.
If I see one more Washington Post or New York Times editorial that says that Americans aren’t the sort of people who torture, I’m going to vomit. Again.
The fact that Bush wanted to torture people was obvious from the moment that his administration opened a prison in Cuba and explicitly stated that they were doing so in order to evade US law. The fact that he went to war under false pretenses was also well known.
Bush was re-elected because more than 60 million Americans liked the fact that we invaded a country just because their leader was pissing us off. They liked the idea that the world was learning to fear us, because we were willing to invade their countries, kill their leaders, and torture their citizens.
They liked the feeling of being the crazy badass that nobody messes with.
Also, let’s not pretend that this bullying attitude was the result of the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks only used as an excuse. This attitude dates to long before then.
Thomas Friedman, often considered a moderate or even a liberal, was writing things like this in 1999:
Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.
Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around. Let’s see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance.
Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.
Friedman was actually among the more restrained voices. And that sort of diatribe isn’t just something that members of the chattering class say to amuse one another. Talk to 20 random Americans about the Middle East, and you’ll hear that sort of attitude at least 7 times. In some neighborhoods, you’ll hear it 17 or 18 times.
So it’s time to face reality. We live in a nation that’s not divided along lines of class or religion, but along lines of morality. And more than 100 million of us are on the side of aggression, warfare, and torture.
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Paul Tergeist says:
Want to read something interesting? Read the whole article. Don’t stop at the end of the first page.
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will says:
I love how they constantly talk about torturing “terrorists” as if they only do this to people who are clearly terrorists.
Our lame republican-ass-kissing media constantly reports this as “Terrorist torture policies.”
Not that it should matter, but the press constantly repeats Bush’s talking point that we are only going to torture the really, really bad guys to stop them from killing our sweet little children in the most barbaric ways.
Then, go see Malkin’s rantings about the horrors of christians on trial for offenses that they didnt do.
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Infidel says:
Why would it be necessary to legally protect interrogators? Because the task is jobbed out to corporations and contracts won’t be signed without the “cover legal expenses” clause.
Here is the other thing- soldiers are ORDERED to their deaths, forced to travel roads known to be dotted with IEDs, over their objections to traveling in insufficiently armored hummers, and at the risk of disciplinary actions for refusing orders. Such is war.
ORDER the CIA or their representatives to interrogate at the risk of being prosecuted for stepping over the line. Or don’t do it at all. The line can be determined by military tribunal or a court in accordance with existing law and if it is open to interpretation-so be it, it isn’t in the Presidents job description to interpret the laws or define words like Terrorist, Inhumane, or American.
Go ahead and execute the laws as you see them, let the judicial judge whether your lawful, and let the representative branch legislate what is legal according to their own initiative not the executives initiative. -
Violet says:
Gordo — well said. And those same gibbering sadists among us who are pro-torture are the exact same ones who eat it up when Rumsfeld and Bush speechify about how America “is a force for good in the world.”
Will — the media coverage is even worse than you say. I never see a headline or even an article that refers to “terrorist torture” practices. What I see are “detainee practices” or “detainee interrogation” or “terror bill” — the word torture is never used.
Is the entire media owned by the GOP?
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Violet says:
The article Paul linked to is about Hugo Chavez. For background on how the U.S. media distorts the news from Venezuela, this is an older Palast article:
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will says:
VS:
I blame the liberal press.
It really should be called “Bush’s Compassionate Christian Effort to Prevent the Muslim Devils from Raping and Killing Your Babies” bill.
But the damn liberal press refuses to call the bill what it really is. The bastards.
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ehj2 says:
Osama won. The America we knew is gone.
I would not have guessed America was this fragile, that all the hype about America being special and different was based simply and only upon the fact that she had never been roughed up on her own soil.
Five years ago two buildings were knocked down. We still have no firm intelligence that Osama Bin Laden, the guy who claims responsibility for this tragedy, was actually involved. After claiming we would bring him in “dead or alive,” we have lost our army and the soul of our military we claim to “support” in the burning sands of Iraq, a country with no connection to our original tragedy. And, more to the point, we also haven’t found Osama Bin Laden or brought him to justice.
Nothing else has happened to America at the hand of any identifiable external assailant. Five years ago, two buildings were knocked down. But that’s all the “hardship” and “testing” our “specialness” could take. Our principles began unraveling immediately and have continued to unravel without abate.
Our national security documents now officially endorse (or proclaim as an American prerogative) the notion of preemptive wars — something that Hitler himself didn’t feel he needed to instantiate in law. And we’ve abolished habeas corpus and legalized torture.
True, that last should stand as a sentence by itself. Americans have legalized torture.
If you don’t feel shame in that, you don’t comprehend the price that has been paid in history to abolish this crime.
Our rhetoric describes our current conflict as a global one, specifically, as a “global war on terror.” Essentially, we’re at war with everyone “who isn’t with us.” How we got to a global conflict (involving every nation) from an incident involving a handful of suicide bombers (declared to be “stateless” actors and “dead enders” who simply “hate our freedoms”) is a mystery I can’t even fathom.
And which of our “freedoms” are the ones they hate? The ones we’re voluntarily giving up? Our civil liberties? If we give them up because “they” hate them, who wins in that transaction?
But moving on.
We not only have a larger military than everyone else’s combined, we have a nuclear arsenal suitable for sterilizing the planet several times. We’ve developed plans for using some of these weapons, preemptively of course, against Iran.
We no longer have a free press, a liberal press, an honest press. We have a huge propaganda machine run by a handful of large corporations.
Our civil rights are trampelled. The countervailing powers of our government have been dismantled. Serious thinkers, trained scientists, experienced engineers, reality-based generals and admirals, and constitutional lawers have been purged from the government. Some agencies have been so weakened they simply can’t function.
We can’t clean up our streets after a storm, let alone succeed at improving the lot of the third- and fourth-world countries we seem determined to invade in rapid succession.
We should also note — in the richest country at the richest moment in history, our economy and government is in shambles.
America lost. Osama, if indeed he was ever any more than a philosophical religious zealot in the desert crying out against American corporate imperialism (and actually had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy), has won.
The America I knew is gone. For the price of two buildings. And we deprecate France for falling to the German onslaught so quickly. We were cheaper and fell much faster and much farther.
We’re a rogue state now. Filled with insouciant shoppers.
/ehj2
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Infidel says:
A state of insouciant shoppers is not a bad thing. You get millions of insouciant shoppers and you might be able to finance the building of huge skyscrapers capable of housing companies that employ millions of insouciant shoppers. They might even fuel the insouciant travelers in airlines piloted and maintained by insouciant workers.
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Infidel says:
…But I get what you mean and I would never think you actually thought only two buildings fell on September 11, 2001 any more than you would think New York firefighters insouciant on that day.
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Violet says:
I think Gordo’s comment #8 and ehj2′s comment #15 together summarize as well as anything just where our handbasket has brought us.
Like ehj2, I’m astounded that we’ve lost so much so quickly. I’m astounded to learn that a hundred million of my fellow citizens do not share what I thought were the basic American values, the stuff drummed into us from grammar school on. And as Gordo points out, it seems that they have never shared those values. Everything we learned in school about the Constitution and liberty and justice and all that was just words to them. Meaningless words. All they really believe in, apparently, is “we’re us and you’re not.”
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Timothy Shortell says:
Comrades,
Join me in the People’s Republic of NYC. All we need to do is push Manhattan and Long Island a little further out to sea. (How far out constitutes international waters?) How hard can that be?We’ll celebrate liberty, equality and respect for the dignity of all persons.
Oh, we’ll need an army. The godbags have guns, and they are willing to use them.
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richard cherry says:
Vi – I have just arranged your work permit. You are now officially employed as house pedant at Cherry Towers, Westbourne Grove, Feministan. Your duties will include telling people interesting and useful stuff, making my blog worth reading and a little light dusting – nobody ever dusts the lights in this country any more. You may have to come out with amusingly stupid ‘american’ comments like ‘Say do you guys have Christmas over here too?’ ‘Britain is great – it’s so much older than the States’ ‘I love your English accent – it’s like Irish’ and ‘Ooh, you’re from London – I have a friend in Paris, maybe you know her?’
The rest of you can bloody well sit and suffer – I told you not to be Americans. -
Cory says:
I want to move. I am so frustrated and sickened with this country. After watching the responses to the UCLA student who was tasered and how so many “Americans” justify the police brutality, the torturing of people, the hate of denying homosexuals rights, I just want to cry, throw my hands up in the air and run. I really do…
