The Torture Question
I saw the PBS Frontline program on US torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib last night. One question: they tried to impeach Bill Clinton for having his dick sucked -- so why do Rumsfeld, General Miller and General Sanchez get a free pass? Even though they’ve promoted torture, rendition (exporting prisoners to other countries for torture), and an atmosphere in which our own young soldiers are brutalized as they're encouraged to beat up Iraqis and break their fingers in their homes, in the back of Humvees, and in prison?
posted by Adam @ 6:27 AM
3 Comments:
Saw the same documentary.
Simple fact is, these men are all soldiers. They take orders. It all emanates from the top. And the source for all the chicanery is that document put out by the President in 2002 which parsed out the application of the Geneva Convention to detainees. Any autonomy these men had in carrying out these grey-area operations, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, or elsewhere, was a direct result of the Presidential directive put out in 2002.
Putting down any of these men for what they did would be a direct admission that the President was wrong. And you know that's not gonna happen. Congress, I suppose, does have oversight on this particular thing; but for one, THEY voted for both wars. And for another, Congress knows that the CIA has been in the torture business for decades: to repudiate the President's torture policy now would set off an unnecessary fight over who gets tortured when and under what circumstances. (Notice even, that McCain's bill does NOT address CIA interrogation tactics, even as they're a player in the war.)
Sure those men are soldiers and took order. still the fact that these men took orders it's not really an excuse. How come those order were given?
I think the real anwser is: because of 9-11. That day changed all the moral standards on what America and its allies are allowed do in order to achieve their so called political results. Thanks to the curtain of 9-11 lies and make-ups the Bush gang really went into the big business, forced everyone to adapt to their enormous needs.
There'll come the day though, when even their followers will regret of not having any moral principle to which attach to the unleashed army. And it will be probably too late.
Remember Chile. After their 9-11, military unleashed, anything that could happen happened. No way to be reasonable with militarized authorities.
They won't stop until their thirst of power and money will be satiated, and when the taste of blood will finally disgust the generals, the politicians, the corporations.
Bad, crucial thing is that, with the new technology cocoon in which every military action is bundled, it is harder to feel disgust for distant bloodsheds. As Svevo said at the end of Zeno's Coscience:
"Whatever effort to give us health is vain.
(...) The bespectacled man invents devices outside of his body and even if there was health and excellence in the inventors, it almost always lacks in the users. The devices are purchased, sold and stole and the man gets more and more crafty and weak. His first devices might have been extensions of his arm, and couldn't be effective but compared to its force, but, by this time, the device has no relation with the arm. (..)
When the venomous gases won't be enough, a man just like all the others, in the secret of a room in this world, will invent an unequaled explosive... And another man, also made just like everybody else, but a little more ill than the others, will steal this explosive, will climb up to the center of the Earth to put it in the spot were its effect will be the utmost. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear and the Earth, back to her nebula stage, will wander in the skies devoided of parasites and diseases." Er, translation is mine... Don't blame the author!
Svevo wrote this words after the end of the first World War. He died in 1928 after a car accident.
I'm so fucking upset about this -- it's actually the issue that started this blog -- that I'm working up a new post about it. Coming soon.
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