i am sickened anew by the neverending corruption of george bush and his minions in this, his lame-duck period when the criminal-in-chief can pardon anybody he feels like pardoning. no justification necessary.
not that bush has ever been overfond of justification. but anyway:
here come advance bush pardons for his ever-loyal cadre of torturemongers. the guilty include cheney, rumsfeld, gonzales (who will need a second pardon for his illegal firing of 9 US attorneys), ashcroft and rice. please sign the ACLU petition against this. will that stop him? unlikely. but don’t let that stop you from USING YOUR VOICE.
torture. it’s nothing but a word, an abstraction, for most of us. thank god. but there’s nothing abstract about it in practice. torture serves many evil functions. it’s important to remember that an interrogator’s primary function is not to get the truth, but to confirm certain “facts”. these are often two very different things, and a “good” interrogator (apologies for that oxymoron) can get most anyone to swear to most anything. that is being demonstrated even as we speak by the interrogators in mumbai who have predetermined afghanistan’s responsibility for last week’s terror attack, despite all (and there is quite a bit of it) evidence to the contrary.
meanwhile, routine political gamesmanship is already going on around the prospect of bush’s prepardons.
the fact that torture devastates people, destroying both bodies and minds, is almost secondary to the tremendous destruction that comes to pass when these interrogators torturers ”extract” pure bullshit from their victims. WARS start over misinformation. listen to george bush in this interview talk about how he would not have taken us to war against iraq if he’d had better intelligence; the idiot actually SAYS that one of the “greatest disappointments” of his administration was not having found WMDs in that country. (are you fucking kidding me? can’t he at least be more disappointed over having started a war for no reason than over not finding a pile of nukes in the fricking desert? but i digress.)
so, on planet torture, one person suffers beyond imagination then (usually) dies screaming, but right behind him (or her, there are women in those cells too, don’t forget) hundreds of thousands of people — iraqi citizens, american soldiers, various and sundry innocent bystanders – go to their graves. that is what torture accomplishes.
and of course, another inevitable by-product of becoming a nation of torturers (we are, there is no denying it) is that other nations become set on capturing, torturing and killing OUR citizens. and so the beat goes on.
if you have the time (about half an hour) and the stomach for it, watch this video. listen to the voices of the tortured. look at the photos from guantanamo bay. then listen to the CIA talking heads and politicans. so pretty and clean-shaven in their suits, in their nicely lit offices. their hands unbound. no blindfolds on their eyes. no blood running from their genitals.
if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, just look at the section that starts about 11 minutes in. then go and sign that petition.
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Bush and Cheney need to be tried for war crimes. They’re actions have made the world a lot less stable and have actually put American citizens in a lot more danger. I don’t want to be a pessimist but I have a bad feeling that they are going to ride off into the sunset.
Marcus Kwames last blog post..Darling Daughter
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