As more information continues to come out about the nature of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” program, there is a deadly serious set of realities that our country has to come to terms with.
Waterboarding, while you might argue isn’t all that bad, is legally torture. Plain and simple, it’s illegal, and Bush Justice Department officials did a lousy job trying to argue that is was legal. So we have an issue of legal accountability to deal with there, and it’s important because if our nation is not to look like it believes the law only needs to be followed when it’s convenient, we have to enforce the law by punishing those who may have broken it.
On top of that, there is the issue of why torture was used in the first place. There is the unsettling concern that intelligence officers were working over suspects in order to get them to “reveal” information tying Saddam Hussein to Al Qeida. As the entire reason we went to war in Iraq in the first place has thus far turned out to be a crock, we need to know if there were instances of extreme actions taken (by anyone, for whatever reason) to make the desired picture come into focus.
Look, they waterboarded one guy almost 200 times in one month; that itself goes outside of the parameters set by Bush’s legal team. What the hell did they need to do that for?
In any event, we need the whole story. We need to know how much congress knew about this program when it began, what they didn’t know, and why they didn’t know. We need a complete investigation of how it became official policy to use interrogation techniques that the U.S. has tried and executed people for doing. The Geneva Accord is not some piddly-ass agreement that the American government can piss on. There are a score of countries that are prepared to arrest Bush administration officials if they ever enter their countries on charges of committing WAR CRIMES.
You think they’re just doing that to be jerks? Maybe they don’t like that their citizens can be picked up by the CIA and flown to a secret detention facility and held there without any legal recourse, while being waterboarded until they say something interesting.
Yes, that happened. More than once. You can come up with any rationale you like that to make that kind of thing seem necessary, but then you have to ask yourself, if you can’t know why they did that, how can you know it had to be done?
People have died because of the Bush administration’s heavy-handed response to 9/11. Detainees that were alive when they went into a detention facility (like Abu Gharib) came out in a body bag. There are pictures attesting to that. It’s not a rumor, it’s not a left-wing anti-Bush conspiracy, it’s just been forgotten because Americans move through the news cycle too fast to let anything register as being important.
The CIA black-sites, the prisoner abuses, the torture and murder of people in our custody, these all really happened and have a real impact on what’s going on right now. Those actions weren’t just allowed to happen, many of them were organized from the top. The excuse has always been that they were trying to save American lives…
Well, tell that to the Iraqis that have been killed, displaced, and living in a warzone for almost seven years. Same for the Afghanis, who are faring worse than when we arrived (and now Pakistan is spiraling downward). More U.S. servicemen and women have died in Iraq than did in 9/11. You know why people in this country have the audacity to say that we have the right to do whatever is required to protect American lives?
It’s easy when you aren’t the one dying.
We invaded a country, unprovoked, out of fear. We’ve abused, humiliated, and murdered fellow human beings out of fear. And then you wonder why there are people willing to kill Americans in the first place?
When 9/11 happened, it was a wake-up call to Americans, who were by and large unaware that people on the other side of the world had enough of a beef with us to murder innocents. But instead of embracing the outside world, and showing compassion to combat their hatred, we responded with anger, fear, and vengeance. Now, after eight years of President George Bush, we’ve become exactly the kind of nation Osama Bin Laden told us that we were.
We just don’t realize it, because we’re safe here at home. Dick Cheney has been going around the news channels claiming that his torture policies kept America safe, and that halting them will only endanger our country of being attacked again. Naturally, he’s stacked the deck in his favor; the policies he’s defending have guaranteed that someone will try and hit us again.
We are all responsible, because we are the ones who will pay the price for losing sight of who we are. Americans don’t fucking torture. We don’t need to, no matter how evil the enemy might be. We can’t compromise our values, or the terrorists get what they want. They want us to bleed ourselves dry overseas, they want global mayhem and distrust, because that’s when criminals thrive.
We need to admit that we were wrong, mop up the mess, punish those that broke the law, and fix the law so that we don’t allow ourselves to compromise our integrity out of fear again. If we are as great of a nation as we think, then we ought to prove it to anyone who has any doubts. We can’t, however, do it with violence, otherwise we will reap what we sow. Those weak of mind resort to violence, and we’re better than that.
Think about it.
