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Edited on Sun Jul-15-07 04:24 PM by Peace Patriot
Torture combines all Bush Junta crimes:
The moral, ethical and legal implications and consequences of the Bush Junta's many violations of the laws against torture, are intertwined, and must be seen as a whole, because there is no issue that more clearly defines a civilization than its views on torture, its torture history, and its laws on torture.
The torture that the Bush Junta is guilty of is pre-emptive. No one has to be guilty of anything to be tortured. Many, many innocents have been tortured. And even if they are guilty of something, in the guestimate of the US military, they are prisoners, they are helpless--it is grossly unfair and uncivilized to torture helpless people. And torturing people for some possible piece of knowledge in their heads--for something they MIGHT know--is so gross a violation of the human mind and the human spirit as to be worse than killing them. Torture is tantamount to killing the soul.
Torture is banned in U.S. law and international law for a REASON--it is ALWAYS abused, always. It is a method of state terrorism. It is the tool of tyrants. There is never any "national security" purpose that is served by torture. Only in fantasies--in TV shows, in movies, where story lines are highly contrived--is there ever a stark choice, say, between torturing someone or permitting a nuclear bomb to be exploded in a crowded city. And if ever such a situation did arise in reality, those who would make such a decision--torturing someone to prevent a horrible act of terrorism--must make a DECISION TO BREAK THE LAW *AND* TO TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS. If the stakes are so high, and if they are dedicated to protecting large masses of people, then it should be no problem for them to admit what they did and let their peers judge their motives. OR, go to their graves with the knowledge that they committed a crime to save others. Or...third option--a bad one, but a realistic one--cover it up. There is simply no excuse for publicly declaring--or letting it be known along military channels--that long established laws against torture have been nullified by ONE MAN--Emperor George--thus giving free reign to a CULTURE OF TORTURE. This is the REASON for the laws against torture--that it is ALWAYS abused, always. And this is Bush's worst crime--not just breaking the anti-torture laws, but removing the restraints from all persons with power over prisoners by directives from above that torture IS PERMITTED. This is what led to the ovens of Nazi Germany! To killing people and using their skins for lampshades. To killing masses of people deemed "subhumans" and removing the gold fillings from their corpses' mouths to pay for war. When the highest authorities create a CULTURE OF TORTURE, anything goes.
It is a no-brainer that torture is a crime, and that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and others have broken the law. But what they have done is far worse than merely breaking a law. They instead broke a dam--the dam of rules of behavior, ethical principles, "family values"--values instilled at home and at church and by progressive education--bonds of human sympathy and codes of honor, as well as the codification of rules of behavior and codes of honor in documents such as the Uniform Code of Military Justice--such that the beast that lay dormant in every human heart, that is contained by bonds of humanity and codes of honor, was released, and any manner of horror could then be inflicted on "subhumans" (in this case Iraqis and other Arabs) because the powers-that-be had nullified all those restraints. This is WHY torture is classified as a WAR CRIME. It goes beyond lawbreaking and is a crime against civilization.
Once again, you are Jack Bauer. You have compelling reason to believe that the person you have in handcuffs knows the location of a nuclear bomb that is about to be detonated over Los Angeles. You take him into a basement and you apply electrodes to his testicles to force him to tell you where the bomb is. All those stupid sheep out there--other Americans--with their stupid "liberal" laws, don't know what you know--that they are all about to die. So what good are their laws, their government, their civil niceties? You don't likely think this through very well. You are acting out of necessity, spurred on by adrenalin, by fear and anger. You are a hero--or possibly better identified as an anti-hero. Millions of people are about to be incinerated, and, to save them, you break one of their "nice" little laws. Of course, it doesn't occur to you that tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died for those "nice" little laws in WW II. This is a "new" world. This is BushWorld. Everything is black and white, even though it never is, in reality. But take it as given, that this stark, black/white choice could occur. Are you a man? Can you manfully face the consequences of your actions? And what are you fighting to save? Is it just lives? Or is it the complex web of laws, social mores, history, civil order, change by democratic means rather than force, equality, tolerance, legal recourse to settle disputes, creative energy, high ideals and tragic failures, that make up the civilization that those millions of people are living?
If you are a man, if you truly have spine, and if you have any understanding at all, you know that what you are fighting for is a civilization--not just bodies, but ideas--and that, after you have committed your unlawful and inhumane act, to save lives, order must be restored. Lawfulness must be restored. And you must take the consequences. Let a jury decide if you were justified in breaking the law, and are not truly guilty. And if they decide against you, so be it. Like Socrates, you drink the poison, for the sake of civilization.
The answer to these simplistically framed ethical dilemmas is simple: You do what you think is right, as best as you can determine, and you take the consequences. You somehow have the opportunity to kill Hitler, and there you stand, with a gun in your hand. But you are a pacifist. You don't believe in war. You don't believe in killing. What do you do? Personally, I think I would pull the trigger--pacifist though I am (knowing history as I do)--because in that case, it seemed as though the crazed energy of one man was holding that awful killing machine--the Nazis combined with the German army--together. Off him, and it might well collapse. Deep down I know that this no solution. Other Hitlers will arise, and one could well have instantly arisen to replace Adolph. But you do what your fallible human judgment tells you is the best thing to do, in the circumstances. Would the German state have a right to put you on trial and execute you for this crime? Of course not. But if they did so, you would go to your death with something like this on your lips: "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my civilization!"
And if, by some quirk--for history is full of quirks--the "good guys" put you on trial at Nuremberg, and said, "Sorry, you may have shot and killed Hitler and won the war, but you broke the law against assassinating the rich and powerful, and you must pay." In that case, you write a last will and testament in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, or Joseph Heller, or Albert Camus, and drink the poison. For you would likely believe, at that point, that there was nothing you could do to save this civilization, so you might as well die with dignity, leaving some cautionary words behind.
Murderers and torturers always have justifications. Most often, these justifications are not valid--and would not be deemed to be valid by an honest jury. If we permitted murder and torture to run rampant, because the individual committing them has their "reasons," we would be living, not in a civilization, but rather in Bush's jungle world where every "Jack Bauer" makes up his own rules, decides for himself what is lawful, and, because he is the strongest or has the biggest gun, he wins. He walks away. He is not subject to anybody else's judgment. The "rule of men," not the "rule of laws." Our Founders established the "rule of laws, not men." That is the difference between Thomas Jefferson and George Bush. The one helped to create a civilization. The other has created what Greg Palast has called "an armed madhouse." Violence and lawbreaking are necessary, sometimes--or at least justifiable. What makes a civilization--as opposed to an "armed madhouse"--is that, in a civilization, there are consequences for unlawful acts, and only in a lawful proceeding, in a law-abiding and democratic country, can the justification be judged, and the proper consequence be determined. Anything less is fascist anarchy and barbarianism.
Bush's creation of a "culture of torture"--his directive to torture, and his and his regime's open support of torture--has nearly destroyed our civilization, like no other act they have committed. They ARE the "barbarians at the gate." They have not only nullified laws, they have nullified the bloody sacrifices of millions of altruistic people, down through the ages, into the modern era, and to this day, who have suffered death and worse, in order to create a humane and lawful civilization for future human beings. There are no words for this crime. The best I can do is murder of our very soul as a people--in the same manner as the torture of an individual human being is aimed at killing the mind, the soul, the spirit.
I have been very interested in the story of Hypatia, a 5th century female philosopher and head of the Alexandria Library--a famous mathematician and teacher--who was skinned alive by a mob of Christian monks, at the behest of the "patriarch" of Alexandria, a Catholic bishop name Cyril, just at the very moment when Roman civilization was in its final collapse. By accident, in my research, I found out that flaying--skinning someone alive--during that period was believed to prevent the soul from going to Heaven. Cyril wanted more than her death. He wanted to kill her soul--the spirit of learning, of inquiry, of education, of open-mindedness. The parallels to our civilization today are haunting. George Bush and his puppetmasters seem equally intent upon killing not just people, but their souls, and destroying not just our laws, but the spirit behind our laws: our civilization.
As Al Gore thundered in his speech on torture, "How dare they? How DARE THEY?!" But "dare" they did, and "dare" they are doing--with no consequences. And this now becomes the crime of our Democratic Party leadership--the colossal crime of killing our civilization--because, like the Church/Imperial authorities in Rome, as THEIR civilization lay dying, they did nothing when the head of their main institution of higher learning--a beloved teacher, a Roman citizen--was torn asunder on the streets of a Roman city, by men intent on killing her soul. This was not "Saint" Cyril's last act of perfidy against civilization. Nor will torturing prisoners by George Bush's and Dick Cheney's last act against us, if they are not held accountable.
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