Thom Hartmann: Torture Is Not an American Value
The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann on RT TV & FSTV "live" 7pm and 10pm check www.thomhartmann.com/tv for local listings
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He distinguishes between American values--and goes back to George Washington to establish what those are (anti-torture)--and Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld values, which need to be totally condemned and rejected as THE OPPOSITE of our established values. It's a very good point.
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and cohorts are ANTI-American. They are traitors and blatant criminals.
Values are not what we or our leaders always follow; they are what we, as a society, have set up as ideals and attempt to follow, including establishing these values as LAWS, in the Constitution itself, in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and in numerous local legal codes and international laws and treaties, including the UN Charter. But our government leaders HAVE employed torture or condoned torture in many instances, and have also encouraged torture and even taught torture to fascists and the militaries of other countries.
This is SO-O-O-O evident in our history as to be almost unnecessary to say. But, still, a lot of Americans (probably most) don't know about it, not only because the corporate media hasn't exposed it sufficiently (or at all) and our education system has not taught it, but also because it was SECRET and covered up--for the very reason that it was illegal and a shameful violation of our values.
The US was funding and supporting the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Guatemalan villagers in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, including such horrors as forcing family members to watch as pregnant women were disemboweled. Chilean fascists--fully supported, funded and trained by Nixon's U.S.government--were throwing leftists out of airplanes into the Pacific Ocean, and torturing thousands, including the father of the current president of Chile, who died under torture. Oh, and the U.S. also supported the torture of the current president of Brazil when she was a young woman. (And we wonder why "they hate us"!)
Such atrocities are on-going TODAY, in Honduras and Colombia, in particular--funded by the U.S. and very likely the result of U.S. military or other U.S. agency 'training.' In Colombia, the U.S.-funded/'trained' military and its closely tied rightwing death squads have slaughtered thousands of people (trade unionists, community organizers, teachers, political leftists and others), drenched peasant farms with toxic pesticides, has brutally displaced 5 MILLION peasant farmers and lures young people with promises of jobs, murders them, then dresses their bodies up as leftist guerrillas in order to up their "body counts" to impress U.S. senators. Now, today,such things are still going on--although it was worse under Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, who oversaw the initial and most brutal cleansing of the countryside, as prep for "U.S. Free Trade for the Rich" (an abominable trade agreement that Obama has now signed).
Until Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, U.S.-sponsored torture and mass murder were shameful facts, hidden from the American people in various ways. And until Faux News, no one in the news media openly supported torture or would have advocated keeping this crime a secret (as Hartman's clip from Faux News reveals). Have Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld changed our values? They certainly tried to. Before I answer this question, I want to say something more about torture within the U.S.
In addition to secret government use of, and support for, torture, we have a history of torture among slave holders, white bigots, the KKK, Indian fighters, cops, prison officials, execution officials and other authorities, and by ordinary individuals or groups (anti-gay thugs, anti-homeless thugs, gang rapists). RIGHT NOW, prisoners who are Americans are being tortured in American prisons--directly in some instances, in other instances by looking the other way (such a prisoner-to-prisoner rape and gang fights, or instigating those crimes as 'punishments'), and by severe isolation and by miserable living conditions.
Some of these prisoners are INNOCENT. All are human beings! I have a friend who was tortured in a prison in Sacramento, CA, and she was convicted of NOTHING. She was merely being held because of a protest. She did win a lawsuit about this, which may ease the lot of simple, unconvicted detainees in that jurisdiction--for a time, anyway--and it indicates that, in the law, torture is still a crime, though no one was convicted of that crime, in that instance. But what about all the other thousands upon thousands of detainees and prisoners in the U.S. prison system, where routine de-humanization and outright torture occurs?
In the Seattle '99 protests, thousands of people were tortured with pepper spray hoses directed at their faces and heads, as they peacefully sat in intersections (to shut down the WTO meeting), and were detained under torturous conditions (no water, no bathrooms, no food) for many hours. I was a legal observer for those protests. I saw it! Also, the Seattle city council, to their credit, held many hearings about the treatment of detainees and other abuse of power. But police tactics against protestors since that time have only gotten worse.
The whole world knows about these things--but not our own people (on the whole). A culture of de-humanization of protestors, of detainees and of prisoners HAS developed among U.S. police forces and prison authorities. And this disgusting culture has gone hand-in-hand with the militarized police shooting unarmed black men dead often for nothing at all, or minor infractions, and certainly before they ever saw a judge or were even accused of a crime, let alone convicted.
We've all now seen it with our own eyes. What we've seen is the tip of the iceberg. Dehumanization, beatings, killings by police are a common threat against young black men and boys in particular. These things have also occurred against Spanish Americans, for instance, the police killing in Santa Rosa, CA, of a thirteen-year-old carrying a toy gun--shot multiple times until he was dead. And the dehumanization, beatings, rapes and torture occur routinely within our prisons.
This foul police culture was developing prior to Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, but became much, much worse during their junta, both within the U.S. and outside of the U.S., with B-C-R re-writing our laws to suit their enjoyment of torture, and to legitimize their torture and murder of anyone, anywhere in the world, for fun and profit. Have our American values on these matters--established by our founders, way too often ignored, but strengthened, as values and laws, just after WW II--been destroyed by these traitors and criminals?
In May 2004, a NYT poll revealed that 64% of Americans oppose torture "under any circumstances." This was only 3 years after 9/11, and in the midst of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't think peoples' opinions on this have changed. (And it sure is difficult to see how the torturers were re-elected. Hint: they weren't.) But it's still not all Americans opposed. Some of the 36% would probably quality their support for torture as a "dire circumstances" matter (terrorists about to drop a nuclear weapon over Los Angeles--a la that TV series "24 Hours"
. Fear may have moved them to make an exception on torture. The rest maybe just thought it's okay for the government to torture "terrorists." Probably half and half. 18% pro-torture. 18% pro-torture in a grave emergency. 64%--no way, never, under NO circumstances.
I think what needs to be faced is that torture is a dividing line. We have TWO Americas: The vast majority strongly oppose torture and would oppose human rights abuses in our own prison system if they knew about it. A minority don't think about it much, if at all. They think of the victims of torture as "other"--not themselves--and have given away their power and their rights to the government, psychologically, at least. And the government, the military, the police and the .01% who own everything are benefiting from this indifferent minority. But the power of these powers-that-be is very tenuously based, on this and other issues.
Powers-that-be seldom relinquish any power. They will NOT relinquish this one, believe me--report or no report, a liberal in the White House or a Bush in the White House. That is why they need 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--for establishing powers like torture, and for keeping them established.
The dividing line is the have's and would-be have's (say, 20%, altogether), and the have-not's (the vast majority). The have's and the would-be's want to be protected not just from "terrorists"--at any cost in values or law, or civilization itself--but also from us--from you and me and our brother and sister have-not's. That's what this is all about, really--OUR American values of justice and fair play vs. the ruthlessness and immorality of the few.
Our American values are in tact, among most Americans, in my opinion. As with so many other issues, we have a problem with a grave disconnect between leaders and led. The rich and powerful torture, while the rest of us try to hold on to our values, the law and morality.
I think we will find that this torture report, prepared by an alleged Democrat (Diane Feinstein) goes nowhere. That is what such reports are for. There may have been a threat of disclosure from other sources, so Feinstein and other corporate-military servants got to work. Or it's a weapon in some nasty internal war that we will never hear about.
Reports like this simply do NOT occur to reform the system but rather to protect the system--to keep it in place. (The 9/11 commission report had a similar purpose, as did the Warren Commission report, and others, with few exceptions.) There has been no such report on the war on Iraq or Afghanistan, where billions of dollars have gone missing--not to mention millions of innocent people slaughtered and millions more displaced. These crimes are as heinous as torturing people. No report; not even an investigation. And what about Cheney giving all the contracts to a corporation he had headed--Halliburton--and that was failing at the beginning of these wars, to fatten his already fat pension? That has stuck in my craw for a long time. WHERE is the investigation (let alone prosecution)?
But even if there had been an investigation of these wars, we would just get another "report" and we would simply never see Cheney prosecuted for his crimes. As we have been told, by President Obama, "we need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the rich and powerful. The 'crime' of Eric Garner, however, gets the death penalty, and the police murderers of Eric Garner get off scott free. And Obama treats it all like an anomaly and nuisance, and an excuse to give MORE billions of our tax dollars to the cops (for cameras--ri-i-ight!).
We need to understand that it's their job to kill the poor as lessons to us all, and to fill our prisons with those who have to sell single cigarettes on the street to make a living, in order to torture the survivors of an encounter with the police in our harrowing prisons. That's what would have been next for Garner--torture, beatings, rape, and if he objects, isolation torture. Now. Today. Across America.
These are NOT our values. They are the "values" of the .01%.