I love how this country devises new ways to always avoid taking responsibility for its past mistakes. Did we torture people to death for no good reason? Oh well, we can’t admit it or our soldiers deployed overseas will be put at risk. This is why we never saw many of the more appalling photos from Abu Ghraib. It would have inflamed international opinion and made people want to kill our troops.
It’s also why it’s taking so long for us to see the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the treatment of detainees. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is threatening to declassify the report unilaterally, and the National Security Council counters that they need advance warning so they can move pieces around to protect our people serving abroad.
Let’s start with the fact that we shouldn’t have tortured anyone to death or tortured them at all. Then let’s stipulate that things might have looked a little better if the torturers hadn’t been given a Get Out of Jail Free pass. Finally, let’s stop being idiots and admit that people already are killing our people because of what we did and that the best way to assure that our people don’t do it again is to just be fucking honest, for once, about what was done in our name.
Are you fucking kidding me, BooMan?
If there’s one thing that Traditional America hates, more than limousine liberals, more than hippies, more than transsexuals, more than atheists, it’s anything that challenges the delusion of American exceptionalism. Especially when the calculus is that:
A.) A lot of people have good, even excellent reasons to hate America.
B.) Next to the plutocrats, Traditional America bears the most responsibility for this animosity.
C.) Ignoring A and B is what’s fueling A and B.
And Traditional America’s response to being confronted with this uncomfortable reality is to shriek and politically destroy anyone stupid enough to do so.
Honesty is contagious. The Permanent Government cannot afford an honesty epidemic. Where would it end?
The lies will go on forever…at least until the whole edifice rots out and falls.
We gonna be back in the U.S.S.R. before long.
All over again.
These Beatle boyz was inhabited by prophecy!!!
Bet on it.
AG
Geez!!!
I got another idea!!!
Why not just disband the CIA!!!???
That’d cut the lying down a whole lot!!!
Eh?
What’s that you say?
They’re “necessary?”
Oh.
Nevermind.
Twice!!!
Yore freind…
Emily Litella
How would you dismantle the CIA? How many politicians want career-ending scandals? How many reporters would give the anti-CIA side?
I don’t disagree with you that the CIA is the nexus of the disfunction of our society, but it’s not like a stroke of the pen is going to solve this.
I started a reply. It turned into a full post.
Here it is.
Why Can’t We Just Be Honest? I Had A Dream Last Night.
AG
Honesty would hurt the US economy.
Some remarkable footage on what our friends in Kiev are doing:
Remember when the Dems took control of the House in 2006? What heady times. By then it was indisputable that the Bush administration had lied us into war with Iraq. There was proof positive that that same administration was actively condoning violations of the Geneva Convention and international law. Remember the blockbuster revelations that came to light as the House Democrats actively and aggressively investigated Bush administration misdeeds?
Neither do I.
Let’s assume that the Democratic Party aggressively pursued the misdeeds of the Bush Administration and it turns out that the rabbit hole is as deep as we thought it was. Complete with the majority of the American public supporting impeachment and even criminal conviction of the architects of the Iraq War if need be.
Then… then what happens? Does Traditional America suddenly forever forsake the American exceptionalism and the overweening belligerence that led us into that mess in the first place? Do the neocons get permanently shamed out of an American tradition going back to at least Polk of starting wars for profit? Do we regain the trust of other nations who more than realize that it’s not the Bushes and Cheneys responsible for our arrogance and violence — it’s the cringingly moronic Joe and Jane Sixpacks demanding a big strong daddy figure to assuage their fears and egos?
And that’s a best case scenario. What would then happen if the Democratic Party didn’t find anything juicier than run-of-the-mill military grift and a few more Abu Gharibs?
I wasn’t interested in a sea change. I’m too old to believe that could happen. I wasn’t interested in seeing anyone punished. I was interested in seeing what went wrong. I thought that it was the responsibility of Congress to…
Wait, I used the words “responsibility” and “congress” in the same sentence. That just blew my computer’s oxymoron chip. Gotta’ go now and order a new one. G’night, all.
Gosh, doing the right thing might not turn out the way we’d like.
Never mind then.
It goes on and on like this. The U.S. claims to be this great beacon of democratic ideals but it’s never been so. Time and again, this county has either behaved unethically or watched as other did on our behalf. How many democratically elected governments have we toppled? Countless are the number of people we’ve murdered. After My Lai became public, the army found its scapegoat in Lieutenant Calley. But then even this junior officer couldn’t be punished because middle America went ape-shit. Some, correctly, because his superiors who had passed down the orders had gotten a free pass. But for others it was because America can do no wrong.
If it makes you feel any better, American exceptionalism is becoming increasingly discredited in the eyes of the younger generations. I don’t know if that’s going to keep us out of a Vietnam 3.0/Iraq 2.0, but it’s definitely the most vital step. Once Americans stop feeling like foreign policy exists to validate their egos and cultural prejudices, that’s like half of our job complete right there.
I want America to be exceptional, but we are not and acting like we are makes things worse.
… our soldiers deployed overseas will be put at risk.
An illustration how well state propaganda works. Exactly why U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam, I was a kid but an what older Polish immigrant neighbour sent his only son to Vietnam to fight the commies over there. He gave his life for his father’s revenge. In following article, David Siegel from the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles stated: “… to really defend the civilized world against the threat of Islamic terrorism.”
Cross-posted from my diary – War Crimes by Moral Desolate IDF Soldiers of Golani Brigade.
Honesty? From politicians?
Honesty on one thing would cause the who fabric of lies and deceits built so carefully during the Cold War and nurtured very carefully since the outburst of a little truth during the Nixon administration. Then, Watergate led to exposure of NSA snooping, FBI COINTELPRO, and the massive Orwellian system put in place in 1947 under the post-WWII Red Scare (in capital letters) that blacklisted many truth-tellers. With the Reagan administration that reality was papered back over with huge amounts of publicly funded and privately funded propaganda.
Truth on the NSA is out there. Truth on torture will be one more blow against the deep state. Truth about who were are actually arming is coming out through reports on the effectiveness of DoD inventory systems and the fact that we are still shipping arms to Afghanistan, which is awash in arms from 35 years of warfare.
If truth comes out, we will know that we live in an Orwellian state run by the likes of the profiteering Keith Alexander and David Petraeus. And that the Congress is too idiotic in one party and too cowardly in the other party to cut their money off and restructure national security institutions so they actually provide national security instead of national adventurism and the perpetuation of a pseudo-masculine “warrior” culture.
Are the people of the US ready for that truth when the reality is wingnuts parading in American cities open carrying semi-automatic (and jury-rigged automatic) weapons) simply to assert their “freedom”.
Democratic Party didn’t impeach Dubya/Cheney. We didn’t even try. No one even attempted anything, scared to death of the consequences & with that begins another cycle of horrors we won’t face either.
Your optimism is blinding you, NOTHING EVER wil be done about these war crimes of immorality. And the progressive writers who keep typing away “We need to do something” need to come to terms w/ that TODAY.
And the torture? That hasn’t stopped,Booman. And it won’t stop. Your country has lied to you & will continue to lie to you. That’s the nature of this government, sell you a dream that it can’t possibly deliver. That’s how they get you “One day…one day …we will bring justice to america”
Too late….. But it was a solid “CON” for a while. But decade after decade of history shows us the pattern repeating “This time will be moral and just”
We’re getting lied to now. People refuse to ask themselves why we give a toss about Ukraine just like they bought that we’ve been in Afghanistan for fifteen years because Osama once lived in a cave there, and, well, we might have been wrong about the WMDs and yellowcake but once we were in Iraq we might as well kill a few. And Syria, because Assad is a bad man, and Libya because Khadafy was a bad man.
The interesting thing is that there is a coherent policy that runs through all this, and it has nothing to do with bad men (otherwise we would have flattened the House of Saud decades ago) and it has nothing to do with our military security. People just don’t want to take the time to figure it out.
We deplore Iraq but Afghanistan is the noble mission. Excuse me? What on earth gives us the right to stay in areas like this? What a herring we are being sold and supposedly it was a sale price, we are paying double for it.
Man, if this keeps up we deserve these exercises in gullibility. If I was a tried and true cynic I would say this strikes me as we like to start wars solely so we can talk about them in the media nonstop & then we blame the democrats for the mess EVERY DAMN TIME.
In real time (2002-2003), few Americans noted that GWB didn’t want UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, told them to get out, and then lied about what they’d (not) found.
Nor today do we note that Kiev is behaving as if they don’t want plane crash investigators on the site of MH17 crash. One doesn’t need to be much of a skeptic to wonder why.