[Promoted by Chris]
The Washington Post editorial board has a question:
AT THE SENATE intelligence committee hearing Thursday on Gen. Michael V. Hayden’s nomination to head the CIA, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the nominee a simple question: Is “waterboarding” an acceptable interrogation technique? Gen. Hayden responded: “Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail.” That was the wrong answer. The right one would have been simple: No.
The Congress passed a law banning this technique explicitly. The President signed it. Of course, then he made a signing statement that essentially said “I could bypass this ban if I, um, want to.” Hayden gave a de facto admission that this was indeed happening.
On a day when a sergeant faces trial for threatening detainees with dogs at Abu Ghraib, we have also learned about senior official involvement in the torturing of prisoners:
As the Iraq insurgency grew rapidly in the spring of 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld complained to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in the country, that he was not seeing results from the interrogations of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers.
“Why can’t we figure this enemy out?” Sanchez recalled Rumsfeld asking in frustration, according to a previously unreleased transcript of a July 2005 interview by senior Army investigators. “Was there intense pressure? You bet. You bet there was intense pressure” to extract more from the interrogations, Sanchez said — some of it self-imposed and some of it emanating from “different levels of the chain of command.”
Somewhere we have lost our way as a nation when we have to become the butchers we’re fighting in order to beat them, when we have to ignore the morality Americans cherish and mandate in order to satisfy some craven bloodlust, when we have to waterboard, electrify, humiliate, sodomize, kill the enemy. This doesn’t result in good intelligence, and at some level I think these higher-ups at the Pentagon know that. But they don’t care. They’re under a lot of pressure from whoever their boss is, and they doubtlessly get some secret satisfaction from kicking some ass of the brown people (even if they weren’t terrorists but innocents sold to the Americans for the ransom money). The UN has urged the closure of Guantanamo and I don’t think that would matter one bit. You can open and close bases every couple months. But until we root out and remove the element that considers torturing another human being to be legitimate and warranted, nothing will change. Because in that moment, we’ve lost ourselves.
D’you do that here?
xposted at my site.
thanks
is that there are oodles of people in this country that really think torturing people is ok. I don’t see much hatred of brown people where I live, but I do see lots of it on the right-wing websites. Lots of people write in to say that Muslims deserve to be brutalized, and so do Mexicans. Muslims because they are not Christian and are all terrorist bastards and hell bent on destroying America and Mexicans because they are all stealing our jobs, speaking foreign languages, stealing our tax dollars, and hell bent on destroying America.
We lost our way a long time ago, or perhaps we have we have always been stumbling around in the dark. Only now, we are so far gone into the depths, that it will take a real strong light to help us find our way out again. Torture isn’t knew in the American lexicon, Bushco is only using more of it, more often, and for weaker reasons.
Doh! knew=new. I’m a bit tired.
George Bush is the biggest terrorist in the world today.
After several decades of rosy optimism, I’m basically drinking myself to death the last few years. Literally. I’m in despair, although I’m trying all I know to get out of it, to latch on to hope and faith. But I’m so shocked, I’m afraid I’m really declining into an early death. That’s just the truth. I’ve lost hope (although it keeps trying to push its way back).
Every day I have the spectacle in front of me of fat, happy Americans in big cars with Support Our Troops stickers next to their religious stickers and My Child Is An Honor Student stickers–and none of them seems to give one single shit about the fact that we’re–WE ARE–routinely torturing fellow human beings, routinely bombing tens of thousands to death, all out of fear and greed.
For years while I was building up a fledling little business, I never had much time for TV or news on the Internet, although I used to always read the Washington Post. On 9/11, I was in London, England, and my return home was delayed for a week by the air system shutdown. I spent that time doing nothing but drinking and watching news, even though it was lovely weather and there are a million things to see and do in Britain. I think I have something like PTSD from those days.
But in those days, it seemed to be a clear picture of evil terrorists and noble American first responders. My grandfather served in WWI and I hung his funeral flag at my office. I bought a lot of flags. I had about three months of intense patriotism, kind of like a flu.
And then reality started hammering down.
I’ll stop there.
Arminius – please stop it. You know that alcohol consumption will kill you – do you really want to die? It is a depressant – but easier to blame others for our despair. There is now and has always been so much ugliness in the world, but there is beauty as well. The best we can do is decide where to focus our attention. If you want to live, try to change yours.
There are ways to escape alcoholism and stop torturing yourself. If you stay where you’re at, it will definitely hurt you or somebody else.
I really want you to stick around.
Thank you. I’m cringing at the melodrama of my note. It is true that I’ve been in something like shock for several years, and the torture issue is at the center. I keep coming back to the thought with horror: I just can’t believe that most of my fellow Americans are indifferent or even enthusiastic. As for the rest, I seem to be hung up on step 3, but there’s always hope. Sigh.