|
This isn't an aberration, so don't congratulate yourself that you live among the good or absolve yourself. We torture as a matter of state policy and have for a long time. It's much worse under these thugs, because they truly feel to be the master race, but it's policy.
Not only does it make sense, it makes sense from every vantage. The only thing that makes it hard to comprehend or accept is an ingrained presumption of decency. If you pull out the filter that "of course we're the good guys", everything else makes perfect sense and is quite consistent.
We demand others to be subject to international law and the War Crimes Court, but demand to simultaneously not be subject to it, yet a prime de facto Grand Jury.
We avoid declaring wars, so we can dance around the Geneva Convention.
We have a huge, unaccounted budget for these kinds of things; how do you think we use that money?
We keep suspects in questionably foreign bases so we can specifically avoid any accountability. Personnel based there has disappeared, detainees have attempted suicide, who knows what else goes on there.
Military Intelligence and private contractors run the interrogations, and we keep "shadow prisoners" who are off the books. The abuse of October-December '03 that's the current issue was done at night; this is deliberate sleep deprivation, which is a classic torture procedure.
We kidnap families of wanted Baathists, including women and children.
There are numerous instances of torture that were documented in Vietnam and nearby areas during that conflict. There are also substantiated tortures and murders throughout South and Central America throughout the 70s and 80s that were done by the CIA and charming private operations like Pug Winokur's Dyncorp. It's not for nothing that there's a joke among Latin American Diplomats that they feel happiest and most relaxed when posted in D.C.: it's because there's no U.S. Embassy there.
There has been much open talk in the media and government since 9-11 about when and to what degree torture is justified, and the lack of outcry has been taken as tacit approval. The trial balloons floated by swimmingly. Indeed, much of the country does approve, so this hand wringing and keening is nothing but a load of self-serving denial and equivocating.
There will be more things coming out because we do this as policy; it's not a few bad apples, it's the whole barrel.
What's good is that as the administration and its apologists go on record covering for or excusing it, they say things that are truly ugly. With each statement that "it's only 6", they show two things: 1) that they're willing to claim complete knowledge of something when they haven't the slightest idea what's going on, and 2) that a little torture's just fine. It's just "them" after all, a rogue group of midnight performance artists, and their subjects are more or less subhuman anyway, since they're the worst of the worst, and anyone from "over there" just doesn't value life the same way we do, hates us and have vowed to destroy us and blah blah blah...
When more things come out, everyone who's gone on record saying that it's "just 6" oddballs needs to have that brought up for explanation. If it's something that happened without our knowledge, how do we know that that's all there is? From a purely intuitive standpoint, the default assumption would be that there's much more.
There IS much more, and what's worse is that it's standard operating procedure. No, not everyone, and no, not every facility, but the "high value" ones, yes, and there are a bunch of "high value" ones.
Once the policy's there, life has been commodified to a degree that even worse things will happen.
Yep. Lotsa apples.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
