It's as though having a conscience was something superfluous and, perhaps, a detrimental quality for those that would run this country. That is the take away message from the latest details of the recently publicized torture documents.
I now want to know how the people of Germany have come to understand themselves after the Nuremberg Trials, etc. Time to re-watch The Marriage of Maria Braun.
I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and I am severely saddened by the similarities between what these Bush Administrators are saying and what Eichmann and the other Nazis said about their role in executing atrocities against their fellow human beings.
Fascists, man. I live in a country that can more easily imagine the entire planet being destroyed by an asteroid (unless Bruce Willis has something to say about it), than it can imagine America not torturing or lying or spying on its own people.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
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Which makes me ask...would you leave this place? I can't decide what's better, to leave America or to stay and remain the "minority of the aware".
ReplyDeleteThere was a good interview on The Daily Show last night with this guy from the Foundation for Defending Democracies (go to the web site to see the full 25 minute interview). He claims to be anti-torture but defends all measures that had been taken by the CIA & US military. His claim against the Geneva Conventions is that those rules apply to "honorable soldiers" and not to these terrorist types, completely disallowing any notion of their humanity to creep in.
ReplyDeleteAny enemy combatant, soldier or otherwise, once taken into custody is, essentially, helpless. His captors, who are in complete control of his destiny, have a choice of whether or not to preserve their own humanity in how they deal with their captive.
Stewart asks, were these our soldiers in captivity, how exactly would we react to a captor treating them in the same way we've treated these detainees? I guess that's where cognitive dissonance comes into play. "It's different because we're good and they're bad!"
There were other larger, arguably more important issues not presented such as rendition or the official number of detainees that have died in US custody that have been classified as homicides.
Still, we have to come to grips with what actions are carried out in the name of our country, thereby our names, and that men sat around a table to come up with the semantic basis to legally legitimize what has been deemed illegal, not to mention wantonly immoral.