In fact, I'm amused that so many can be surprised at this late date.
The very same people who brought us the American Holocaust in EL Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua of the eighties have been involved again in post 9-11 U.S. and Iraq and Afganistan -- John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, John Poindextor, Otto Reich, Richard Armitage, and others. Same faces, different places.
The most frightening recent event for me was the appointment of Negroponte to "National Intelligence Director", with responsibility for coordinating intelligence activity within the continental United States. Does he plan to do to us what he did for Honduras and Nicaragua and Iraq? Develop and apply a Salvadoran solution here, too? Our own Battalion 3-16? Look the other way when we have an American El Mozote? Watched without comment while the FNI tortures then drops 31 Salvadoran nuns out of helicopters? Setting up a Guantanamo or Abu Graib is a piece of cake for someone like Negroponte; he successfully oversaw the construction of El Aguacate air base, used to service the illegal Contras and as a detention and torture center. Those Haliburton detention centers, will they be built for "special programs" under his care? If so then evil truly has been unleashed in the most powerful nation on earth and it will indeed be a long, painful struggle to wrest power back into the hands of We the People. I really think this is what we're in for.
O they'll maintain the illusion of "democracy" as long as they can, but they'll drop the charade as soon as it becomes too cumbersome, a slight obstruction to their agenda already well underway, an agenda that steels the financial fortresses of the few that make up a global investing class, all the while knowing we're about to enter an age of limits, an age when oil supplies decline, arable land grows scarce, safe drinkable water a rare and, in the future, packaged commodity bought and sold at profit. When global collapse comes, it is we who will stand locked out of their bubble communities, secured by their private armies, we who will bear the brunt of deprivation and misery and even death. It will happen in a flash, but by then it will be too late for us. Katrina in so many ways was the example in microcosm.
Things will get much worse before they ever get better -- IF they ever get better. As Hunter S. Thompson said somewhere, Big Dark Coming, Soon.
...And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in bed at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to the wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.
-- Carolyn Forche, Return, 1980 (about her experience in El Salvador)
While I agree that the Bush Regime is something extra special -- for example, with Bush we for the most part finally drop the pretense of proxy, up till now we've generally just funded, equipped, trained, and coached -- but it must be acknowledged that torture has been part of the clandestine arsenal for some time. And it is meant to destroy the community from which the tortured are snatched. For example (from
Torture: State Terror vs. Democracy, by Orlando Tizon, 2002),
Modern torture is designed to destroy the personality of the individual and by extension the community. Ultimately, it is a strategy designed to defeat democratic aspirations at the root, which makes it a tool of choice for unpopular regimes around the world.
<snip>
Torture as practiced today is primarily for the purpose of maintaining unpopular governments in power. "We therefore refer to torture as an instrument of power. Our research has shown that the torturers who work for governments try to break down the victims' identity, and this affects the family and the society as well." Thus the main purpose of torture is not to extract a confession but to break the individual's humanity and make an example of the victim before the community and thereby suppress all political opposition. Torture is the ultimate weapon for terrorizing and controlling the individual human being and the community. When members of a community are made powerless and lose trust in themselves and in one another, building a democratic community is rendered extremely difficult and complex. Torture then is an instrument to destroy democratic aspirations and actions, as history has clearly shown.
I completely agree with this assessment. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, too, are good sources for the history of how torture is used by the United States and other repressive states.
Torture, in my opinion, is terrorism in microcosm. Both are public narrative, both intend to intimidate, both are despicably immoral. It must be stopped, now. Shut down Guantanamo, shut down Abu Graib, shut down the clandestine detention centers around eastern Europe and the Caspian Basin, shut down the School of the America, bring the masterminds and their henchment to international justice at the Hague as the War Criminals that they are. Shut it all down, now!!!
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
