Saving Lives, Damning Souls
Posted on
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
by Gary A. Ballard
The CIA has always operated as a shadowy organization, sometimes following questionable policies with enough moral ambiguity to provide a fertile ground for equally questionable tactics. Mining the harbors of Nicarauga, smuggling drugs and selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contras, secret drug research programs, brainwashing techniques, propping up the Ba'ath Party in Iraq, overthrowing the government of Iran and installing the Shah in 1953, all of these things have been attributed to the CIA since its inception. It comes as no real surprise then that the CIA has been the frontrunner organization in America's recent embrace of torture to fight the war on Terror. Just last week, we learned that videotapes of torture sessions involving waterboarding by CIA operatives were destroyed to "protect the identities of the operatives involved." Of course, the protection such operatives required was not from revealation to our enemies but from criminal prosecution once our government de-assified its collective head and chose to follow the law again. But now we have a former CIA operative who participated in torture speaking out, and his words are a slap in the face.
This man admits he used waterboarding. He admits that now he considers waterboarding torture, and that he regrets using the technique. How nice of him. The most galling part of his statement is that the use of the technique he now regrets "saved lives." He traded away America's good name, America's soul, to "save lives."
Bully for you.
I do understand that there are people working their asses off to make me safe. I understand there are a metric fuckton of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are now more likely to be tortured and decapitated when they are captured because someone thought waterboarding was A-OK.
I also understand that as a citizen of this country, I never authorized agents to torture in my name, to break the laws of this land to make me safe. The cost is entirely too high. Every person, guilty or not, who was tortured in the war on terror, was ostensibly tortured IN MY NAME, and in the name of every other American citizen. Those acts of barbarism were done without my knowledge, without my consent, without even the backing of the laws of this land, and they were wrong. They tarnish the very soul of this entire country and everyone in it. Not only were the wishes of the American people that we NOT torture anyone made explicit in the law, those wishes were ignored for what? The sake of expediency? To justify more abuses of the law such as warrantless wiretapping and indefinite imprisonment without the right to object to such confinement?
Kiriakou says that he regrets the torture because "Americans are better than that."
No, it was not necessary at the time. We haven't moved beyond that because not only are we still doing it, the Bush administration has been attempting to make sure those techniques are legal now and are retroactively legal. His cronies in the CIA are destroying evidence just in case he can't bless those acts with the legal stamp. We haven't moved beyond it because assholes like you haven't accepted that such acts are wrong now and more importantly were wrong then. The lives that were supposedly saved, a quantity that cannot be measured because we'll never know what would have been, those lives were not worth damning our souls with the stink of barbarism.
America is SUPPOSED to be better than that, but we've let ourselves believe the lie. We've let ourselves believe the lie that we can do no wrong, that we are better than everyone else. The ugly truth is we have allowed ourselves to fall to a mentality that is no better than the vicious bastards we claim to oppose.
This man admits he used waterboarding. He admits that now he considers waterboarding torture, and that he regrets using the technique. How nice of him. The most galling part of his statement is that the use of the technique he now regrets "saved lives." He traded away America's good name, America's soul, to "save lives."
Bully for you.
"It's easy to point to intelligence failures and perceived intelligence
failures, but the public has to understand how hard people are working to make
them safe," [Kiriakou] said.
I do understand that there are people working their asses off to make me safe. I understand there are a metric fuckton of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are now more likely to be tortured and decapitated when they are captured because someone thought waterboarding was A-OK.
I also understand that as a citizen of this country, I never authorized agents to torture in my name, to break the laws of this land to make me safe. The cost is entirely too high. Every person, guilty or not, who was tortured in the war on terror, was ostensibly tortured IN MY NAME, and in the name of every other American citizen. Those acts of barbarism were done without my knowledge, without my consent, without even the backing of the laws of this land, and they were wrong. They tarnish the very soul of this entire country and everyone in it. Not only were the wishes of the American people that we NOT torture anyone made explicit in the law, those wishes were ignored for what? The sake of expediency? To justify more abuses of the law such as warrantless wiretapping and indefinite imprisonment without the right to object to such confinement?
Kiriakou says that he regrets the torture because "Americans are better than that."
"Maybe that's inconsistent, but that's how I feel," he said. "It was an
ugly little episode that was perhaps necessary at that time. But we've moved
beyond that."
No, it was not necessary at the time. We haven't moved beyond that because not only are we still doing it, the Bush administration has been attempting to make sure those techniques are legal now and are retroactively legal. His cronies in the CIA are destroying evidence just in case he can't bless those acts with the legal stamp. We haven't moved beyond it because assholes like you haven't accepted that such acts are wrong now and more importantly were wrong then. The lives that were supposedly saved, a quantity that cannot be measured because we'll never know what would have been, those lives were not worth damning our souls with the stink of barbarism.
America is SUPPOSED to be better than that, but we've let ourselves believe the lie. We've let ourselves believe the lie that we can do no wrong, that we are better than everyone else. The ugly truth is we have allowed ourselves to fall to a mentality that is no better than the vicious bastards we claim to oppose.
Labels: Bush Administration, Dick Cheney, Fascism, Government Corruption, Habeus Corpus, Iraq, Politics, Presidential Campaign 2008, Torture
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 8:54 AM
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