Letters to the Editor
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Whether or not other countries hate us
fear us, envy us, or love us is a red herring. The important point is that doing the sort of thing detailed in this article is wrong, and a terrible stain upon our national honor and the ideals which we proclaim make us the nation that we are. This kind of thing is an insult to the generations of honorable men and women who have put their lives on the line for the idea of a country in which this sort of thing was unimaginable.
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Adding to the list of "loose groups" posted earlier
1. Un-apologetic, tough guys; “America, love it or leave it!”
2. Embarrassed weepers; “I’m sooo ashamed to be an American!”
3. Cut and Runners; “I’m really considering moving to France/Canada/Sweden.”
4. Finger pointers: “Our leaders are who have done this are reprehensible scoundrels”
5. Analytic realists: “ Each of these positions has some merit, and is worth examining more closely.”
6. Numb: "I just don't care anymore."
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Torture Sites and the Myth of Humanity
How is it possible that we live in a world that still perceives "otherness" in other human beings? There is absolutely no justification for what our givernemnt has done under the guise of protecting us from terrorism. Under the veil of bravado, we have allowed our government to commit atrocities in the misguded hope that we will be safer in the long run, an impossibility that cannot surely be secured by treating other people as if they are something less than human.
And to think that there are thousands of Americans who have been directly involved with the torture of other human beings who also manage to sleep well at night because "I was only following orders."
The price that has to be paid will surely be paid by innocents and not by the perpetrators! How very, very sad!
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Torture hurts the tortured and the torturer
In my mind torture is wrong period. Doesn't matter if the one being tortured is an innocent man or Osama Bin Laden. The fact that Americans are torturing people puts us in the same league as Nazi Germany. All of us, as mad and frustrated as many of us are will go down in history as the generation of Americans who enabled Bush to break the country irreparably.
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Sounds like US prisons circa 1930 or so
Harrowing brutal places to be sure. Hopefully the way we treat these fellows will catch up to how we treat our own incarcerated today.
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CIA KUBARK Manual for psychological torture
The torture being described here has a long CIA pedigree. The CIA is using the psychological torture methods developed by a Canadian psychologist, Ewing Cameron, at McGill University in the early 1950's. The research was performed illegally using CIA funding and resulted in destruction of the lives of hundreds of innocent victims who had come for psychological counseling. The methods were demonstrably able to destroy the sense of self of a person irreversibly, to reduce a perfectly normal person to an infantile, dependent, fearful state, i.e. compliant for a merciless interrogator. These are the methods used for decades against tens of thousands of innocent victims in South America, by the Shah's secret police in Iran, by repulsive authoritarian regimes all over the world, with CIA instruction, funded and supervised by the CIA in the interests of supporting compliant dictatorships. The only difference now is that DOD and the CIA adopted the "say it now, say it proud" approach to torture: acknowledging publicly that the Kubark manual is the basic text for torture by Americans. America, in the hands of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company, has become the worldwide purveyor and instigator of hatefulness, torture, disappearances and international crimes, worse than the Communists, the Nazis, and the puppet dictators in so many corners of the globe who owe their jobs to American intervention, worse because it is overt, defended on the grounds that it is justified, and because it is the action of an implacable, all-powerful Empire.
And why is it done? To bring freedom to a downtrodden people? Don't be ridiculous. To protect the will of the people in places where bad people are ruling? Give me a break. The torture serves the interests of brutal dictators. It is done for a simple but non-obvious reason: in service of the "globalization," or more accurately, the "corporatization" of the world by American and other western businesses. What was Bremer's goal in Iraq? To sell off its industry, its oil, its wealth, to American businesses. The justification was that "we earned it, by kicking out Saddam." Self-government is not permitted in Iraq because that would lead to a virulently anti-American government.
This isn’t just about torture. We can’t fix this by just ending the obvious criminality of the CIA. This is part of a much larger economic picture. This is part of imposition of Friedmanesque radical capitalism wherever multi-national corporations can get away with it through their IMF and World Bank agents: privatization, social welfare terminated, killing unions, i.e. the "IMF structural adjustments" that have been the economic death sentence for population majorities (the democratic majority need we point out) in dozens of countries so far. But those structural adjustments are always imposed against the will of the people, so they are supported by simultaneous CIA funding and training of repression and authoritarianism intended to keep the populace cowed and fearful. That has been the pattern in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Poland, South Africa, and dozens of other countries. Now we are seeing a relentless effort to impose the same on America. Of the top 100 economies in the world, the majority are multi-national corporations. You think they are the least intimidated by America's financial or military power?
In other words, this man was tortured to further the profitability of American businesses. And we are the indirect beneficiaries. All Americans are complicit by allowing Bush to remain in office for one more day.
Worse for you and me directly, aside from the moral stain of allowing this kind of madness to be executed while Americans are in control, with or without an out and out criminal gang like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and their neocon co-conspirators, we will remain complicit as long as we permit multi-national corporations to dictate and control not just political dealings in our country and others but economic policy going under the rubric of "free trade" which is intended to and does benefit the wealthy to the exclusion of the middle class and less fortunate. America is not exempt from application of methods that have worked so well in every banana republic and Third World helpless country "aided" by the IMF and the World Bank. What preceded that "aid?" Some cataclysmic event like a revolution, a coup, or more prosaically forcing a new democracy (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Poland, South Africa and so many others) to assume and pay the crippling debts of the previous dictatorship funded by loans from the IMF and World Bank, that permitted the wealthy elite to ram through a set of "reforms" that serve their own interests exclusively. What was the effect of 9/11? To make America safer or more aware or more tolerant of others? You know the answer to that. Here's the effect and it's no coincidence: Wealth disparity has taken a huge jump in America during Bush's administration and the Republican Congress. That is not some corollary effect of the Republican agenda. It is the point. Tax cuts for the wealthy while children starve, health coverage is denied to Americans, New Orleans continues to fester like an open wound ‘(while the President’s buddies, like Halliburton, Blackwater and so many others, are gorging on profits)? It’s as gross and obscene as it seems.
This man was tortured for another reason: to distract you from recognizing what is really happening. While you're being forced to watch a horror like torture and implicitly to approve it, while you are worried about global warming and education and health insurance, while you spend your time trying to save the wolves, or civil rights, or the ecosystem, the real game is being played out in secret arenas under the guise of "national defense," and in boring public arenas like government regulations as your rights to safety, clean air, a decent job, and a reasonable chance to improve your condition are being robbed quietly, relentless and remorselessly. If it were obvious, it wouldn't work so well.
TonyJ