Blog against torture day

[pecunium]

I tend to not be as much a Blog against/for kind of guy. This is, perhaps a failing.

On this subject, you all know where I stand.

The sad thing is, were there to have been such a day ten years ago, the assumption wouldn't be we were preaching against the US, but rather China, or North Korea, or Iraq.

Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yes. I used to live in a country where no government official, speaking in public, would so much as have considered even hinting at the support of anything that might possibly be considered torture. I still live in the same physical location, but that country seems to have gone elsewhere -- I hope only temporarily, though when or if it returns that stain will remain.

Sorry About Length, But You Got Me Thinking...

[vanmojo.livejournal.com]

"The sad thing is, were there to have been such a day ten years ago, the assumption wouldn't be we were preaching against the US, but rather China, or North Korea, or Iraq."

You know, that's an interesting observation... just a few years ago when rumors of such things were starting to percolate into the national consciousness, my best friend dr_strych9, was one of the first people I remember to take this seriously.

Myself and a couple of our other friends did not. Common sense and common knowledge all argued against it... The U.S. was a signatory to a zillion international anti-torture conventions, it's generally accepted that torture produces questionable intel, it ran counter to nearly everything we were brought up to believe about the organizing principles of our nation...

Torture? The United States? No, that was just crazy conspiracy talk, just a degree of separation or so off of Area 51 and Masonic One World Government zeitgeist.

As each revelation has come out, from Bagram Airbase to Abu Ghraib to CIA Black Sites, etc... it's been a disorienting experience, like I went to bed America and woke up in the Bizzaro world "mirror-mirror" version... I keep expecting to see Leonard Nimoy in a gold lamay sash and a cheesy Lee-Paste-On goatee beard to appear and ask me for my agonizer...sorry, obscure Star Trek reference...

But perhaps the saddest thing has been to see our national reaction to this. Instead of righteous outrage verging on revolution to even the idea we had become this kind of nation, there was a kind of apathetic acceptance... Torture? Hey, as long as they keep the terrorists from interfering with "Dancing with the Stars..." then what the hell... hey what's the latest Britney news!?

Oh sure, a few anti-social malcontents and the dirty fucking hippies were complaining, but you know how they go on... they're always complaining about something...

And this lackadaisical attitude seemed to be contagious in that infected the legislative branch that seemed to be obsessed with doing anything other than exercising their Constitutional duty of executive oversight.

So... quo vadis? Where next? Frankly, I don't know. But what's happened in the last eight years can't just be undone. We can't just walk away from this. If I had "The Answer" I promise I would post if for everyone, but I don't.

But I think people speaking out is good first step...

mojo sends

Re: Sorry About Length, But You Got Me Thinking...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

When it first started to surface I was of a mixed mind. I know what people can do. I know what I (and others) trained them not to do.

I had no real faith in the gov't (esp. this gov't) to not torture people. I had hope the people being asked/told to do it would refuse.

So I wasn't, as shocked, to discover they were doing it. I've been pleased to find that most of the people accused aren't interrogators (and the fools who say it works were trained by other agencies, in the cases where they are called interrogators).

How do we fix it? We repudiate it. We search for the people who did it; more we go after the ones who made it policy.

We will be told "closure", or national comity requires we just let the dead past bury the dead, but that way lies zombies in our future.

Pardoning Nixon got us Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Ignoring Iran/Contra got us pardoned felons in the West Wing, and as heads of depts. That shit has got to stop.

TK

Re: Sorry About Length, But You Got Me Thinking...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Don't worry about length. Say what you have to say.

If it takes more than 4,000 characters, make a split post.

TK

Re: Sorry About Length, But You Got Me Thinking...

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

You know, I went to a very Liberation Theology-oriented Catholic high school where we were taught about the School of the Americas and all the horrors it and the CIA had perpetrated in the name of defending democracy and freedom. Sadly, when the news about Abu Ghraib and black-ops prisons broke, it didn't surprise me one bit. My only hope is that the utilitarian argument against torture eventually wins out in the back offices of Washington DC, because I have no confidence the moral argument against it ever will.