The Good Guys?

How did we land here? Debating torture? The US government in an open debate about the use of torture?

We had a bloody history that was glossed over in the early years of public school and by Hollywood. Genocide. Slavery. Still, we were on the right side of the two World Wars, and the Cold War. We moved beyond the savagery of our early history and were evolving into the only benevolent super-power. We were about freedom, equality and fair play. This was the message that we were told and the message that we believed in as individuals and as a nation.

We were the good guys.

Many can point to dubious deeds of our government in the 20^th Century and claim that we were never the good guys, that it was all propaganda. I can say relatively speaking we weren’t the worst, and we were raising a generation of decent people who believed that we were the good guys, and who wanted to be the good guys. We were driving our nation in the right direction, even if we were not yet at the destination.

We learned that in Viet Nam there were atrocities committed by our side, and as a nation we were shocked. This behavior was not condoned, it was to be condemned. If you were intelligent and open-minded, you understood that under extreme circumstances of war, people are capable of atrocities. You might even have had feelings of pity and sorrow for the soldiers who engaged in this behavior, but you still knew that it was wrong and not the American way. Torture was not the policy of the US Armed forces, and if it happened it was to be treated as a crime.

Torture is barbaric. It is dehumanizing. It is largely ineffective. It does much more harm to our agenda, our reputation and our humanity then any information that could be gained from such techniques. Torture fuels the kind of hatred and retribution that continues between peoples for centuries. Atrocity breeds more atrocity. Torture justifies retribution. The line that separates us from the bad guys is erased by torture. We tell the world that we will free the oppressed people from oppression. We will show the oppressed the ways of freedom and democracy.

How? By torturing them?

What now separates us from Osama bin Laden in the eyes of the Arab world? What do we have left to tell the people of the Muslim nations about our ways and culture to contradict what they have been told by their own kind?

I must say that I am ashamed of the latest news. I am once again appalled after years of being appalled by the actions and policies of this administration. These chicken-hawks who never themselves endured one day on the front-lines of any war, that actively took steps to make sure that they never would be in that situation, these war-mongering blood-thirsty businessmen with a lust for power and oil masquerading as world-leaders are now openly debating the necessity of torture. Outsourcing interrogation to other countries that employ the use of torture. Telling the world what? That the good guys are better than the bad guys, because, well, because we say we are?

And these neocons have the nerve to call us traitors. They have the temerity to question our patriotism. They have the absolute, unmitigated gall to claim that we are a Christian nation, and that God is on our side? I just don’t know how much longer the American people can tolerate the blatant hypocrisy and obvious contradictions.

I am beyond the point of comprehension. I'm now just trying to get to the other side.

We have to win back the congress in ‘06 and the Whitehouse in ’08. We just have to.

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