I tried to sit and calm myself to voice a rational, factual editorial lamenting the wrongs that were revealed in the Senate report on torture under the past administration, but my anger and seething disgust with those who continue to defend the indefensible made it impossible to maintain my composure in order to dispassionately elucidate why they are wrong. One detainee was intellectually incompetent; one was kept naked in a cage and chained to a cold concrete floor until he died of hypothermia; several were denied sleep for up to 108 hours in painful positions with their hands tied above their heads; several were waterboarded - at least one until he actually drowned and had to be resuscitated by medical personnel; at least one and probably more were sealed in a one foot by one foot pitch black coffin for more than a day; one innocent man was hung by his wrists until he suffocated to death, and his body had to be collected by his 12 year old son; several had tubes forced up their rectums to flood their intestines with water; many were administered electric shocks through electrodes clipped to their genitals; others were yanked from their cells and dragged by their wrists up and down the dirt and stone floors of the prison hallways until their face and body were scraped raw. All of this in our name. Of course, Fox News commentators jumped right into the fray by declaring, “So what if we humiliated a few terrorists?” They continued, “The United States of America is awesome.” Fox doesn’t see the report as a way to finally acknowledge and begin to right the wrongs that have been committed, but only that, “This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.” It doesn’t seem to bother Fox that fully a quarter of those detained and tortured were later found to be innocent. Apparently, the right-wing self-proclaimed bastion of Christian morality is not disturbed that some of those tortured were later discovered to actually have been “good guys” – CIA informants who were mistakenly taken into custody. Their moral superiority complex remains intact even though imprisoning “suspects” in literal dungeons and purposely inflicting horrors that would not be out of place in any medieval torture chamber place us right alongside North Korea, Iran, Syria, and other countries we are so quick to condemn. Saxby Chamblis, whose shameful but successful senatorial campaign famously showed videos of Iraq war veteran Max Cleland (who lost both legs serving in the military) morphing into Osama bin Laden, defends the torture by saying that the brutal techniques yielded useful information that prevented terrorist attacks, a claim that is shown in the report to be virtually entirely untrue. He, along with other Republicans, fail to realize that this statement has no bearing on the fact that such torture is completely illegal under international law, besides being wholly immoral. Senator Mitch McConnell decries the release of the report, saying that it will lead to further attacks on the United States and our citizens around the world. What Senator McConnell doesn’t acknowledge is that it is the torture, itself, and not the report, that has caused hatred of the U.S. and has been the most effective recruiting too ISIS and Al Qaeda ever have been gifted. There is a dark mood of malevolence over this country, the origins of which are clear. Weve always struggled with societal hatred and violence, but now there exists a fear-driven institutional paranoia and militarism that threatens to permanently fracture what little semblance of justice and democracy we have remaining. The epidemic of unpunished abuses by our overly-militarized police are a direct outgrowth of the climate created by the sinister policies of our previous administration. We all suspected and were partially aware of the sadistic brutality that was being committed in our name, but now, with the release of the Senate report on torture, a light has been shed on these crimes and abuses, and those who continue to defend these practices are exposed as the sociopaths they truly are.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 14:06:12 +0000
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