Humanity Lost
Here is a great collumn written by Naomi Klein for the Guardian (U.K.). Thanks to the lack of coverage by the Bush administration's stenographers (CNN, MSNBC, Fox "News", New York Times, etc.), most Americans are completely oblivious to the stain left on our nation by Guantanamo and by the Bush administration's torture policies.I've been having a moral conflict of interest watching 24 this year, as the whole program seems to advocate the use of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists. I love the show, but it's sort of hard to accept what they're trying to do with respect to torture. The show is on Fox, and Fox "news" is always on people's televisions in the show, so I guess it isn't surprising.
I think most people would say that it would be okay to torture someone if it might stop a nuclear bomb going off, but the reality is that such doomsday scenarios are not the only reason that the US government is using torture. The outsourcing of torture through "extraordinary rendition", and the stories and pictures from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo reveal that torture has been systematic, and mostly for the purpose of inspiring fear in the Middle East and beyond.
Klein says, "This is torture's true purpose: to terrorise - not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more importantly, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist - the individual prisoner's will and the collective will."
Between torture and other war crimes, America is guaranteed to have an abundance of enemies for at least a few hundred years. It's truly disturbing that most people in America don't even seem care about this. Where the fuck are the "moral values" people on this issue?
posted by Skrambled Egghead Reborn @ 4:25 PM
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