to express the horror and shame one can feel.
That does not even come close to describe what i felt when a friend passed on a link, i opened it, and read From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads in The Guardian. The subtitle on the web page does not give you the full impact, but will point you at what to expect:
In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America's dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage
If one believes what the article offers - and given the track record of the paper for accuracy in reporting I do - what we did, with the apparent blessing of important figures including the likes of David Petraeus, is a national shame.
I am not by nature a vindictive person, as those who read me here regularly know, yet I found myself, after reading the article, responding back as follows:
it fits a pattern
General Miller oversees the brutalization of prisoners in Gitmo so they send him to Iraq to "gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.
I am not a vindictive person by nature, but right now I am fighting an impulse that wants to take all of these, from Cheney and Rumsfeld on down, tie them up, smear them with honey and turn carpenter ants, termites, and rats loose on them while we tape it to show to the world that those who are responsible for torture shall be repaid in kind.
What is it that can cause me to connect with that dark place in myself?
You HAVE to read the article.
This is a story that so far has NOT been picked up by the US media.
But my sense of horror goes deeper, as I explain beneath the fold.
We have a history of which many reading these words will have some awareness. We have been willing to tolerate the use of abusive action by regimes with whom we are friendly. We in the past would look the other way when those trained by our nation would act brutally towards their own people. The infamous School of the Americas trained generations of brutal Latin American military types.
And we know that in the previous administration the practice of "extraordinary rendition" meant turning those in custody over to foreign regimes we knew would use torture.
The Guardian not only has quotes, but has video of people willing to go on camera to describe what they saw.
I do not know how you can read what I read and watch what I watched and not feel that there is something horribly wrong that this nation needs to confront.
I am far from ignorant of history.
I am well aware of atrocities committed in war time by American forces. As we are now learning, My Lai, which itself was covered up for years, is far from an isolated incident in Vietnam. We have seen incidents in Iraq. Now we give medals outranking the Purple Heart for operating drones that kill from a distance while accepting "collateral damage" that undermines any possible support for what we claim to be doing.
Raining death from the sky by drone strikes is in my mind a form of terrorism, designed to scare our "enemies" to thinking that no matter where they are they will not be safe.
Here I reflect on how as we increased the crimes for which we were willing to give the death penalty we made it more likely that accidental witnesses would be killed. We had not learned from the English experience of hanging pickpockets that criminal punishment rarely works as a deterrent, since public executions became perhaps the most likely place to get one's pocket picked.
You will note I am not quoting from the article. That is because I want you to read it without intervention or selection from me.
If you have not done so already, stop and click here.
Read it.
Watch the video.
Perhaps you will recognize that because we did not stop the gentleman in question in his previous efforts in Latin America, because we did not vigorously expose the wrongdoing being done by those acting on behalf of our government in Latin America, it became far easier to expand the practice halfway around the world.
My reference in my email to my friend about General Miller - so long as there are no consequences for this abusive behavior those who do it will be promoted and given occasions to spread the behavior. That happened from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib. It happened with police death squads from Central America to Iraq.
Americans have been complicit.
Few have ever suffered consequences.
The current administration has rationalized not looking back nor assigning the appropriate criminal sanctions for what in many cases were crimes against humanity.
If, as Attorney General Holder has said, we will not punish those who followed the advice of the Office of Legal Counsel when that office was offering perverted language - remember John Yoo writing that it was not illegal to crush the testicles of a minor child in front of his father in order to obtain information - what is to stop a similar process in this or any other administration. How far could the justification go, perhaps to authorizing a drone strike on a blogger who is disclosing what the administration considers information that should not be disclosed?
I am trying to use words to do that for which words are insufficient.
What happened was horrifying.
It should shame our nation.
But our media and our politicians seemingly have no time, no stomach, for addressing this.
So now I ponder how, beyond these words, I should react.
The rant I offered my friend expresses a feeling of which I am not proud. In fact, I acknowledge my own shame in expressing it. It is an illustration of the impotence I feel towards the horror I am forced to recognize that the government of my country not only allowed to happen, but facilitated.
Perhaps I should not be shocked.
We still tolerate 30,000 gun deaths a year.
We still are not in the streets when Wall Streeters crash the economy and walk away even richer and more powerful, with no meaningful consequences.
We allow too many people to lack sufficient food, to not have access to decent health care in a timely fashion - and I certainly include therein dental and mental health.
We have a major part of our nation that sees nothing wrong in cutting the safety net for those who need it while those who don't are given even more generous tax cuts and shelters, at a time when the percentage of our GDP taken in taxes has already fallen to its lowest level in more than a generation.
And yet, even knowing all this, I was shocked to be forced to confront what I read today, forced to realize the implications.
Words are insufficient.
For now they are the only tool I have.
So I offer them here, hoping that someone else can perhaps figure out how we can prevent this kind of madness from continuing.
If not, we are already doomed as a society, and there are no limits to the depravity we are willing to justify, to tolerate.
And soon we will descend into the hell of the Hobbesian vision of the war of every man against every other man.
Right now I am glad I never had children, and sorry I could not do more as a teacher to prepare my students for the hell into which we seem to have descended.
Somehow right now I do not feel any peace.