The Bush Torture Regime: Building Trust in our Leaders in a Time of War

A while back, Ron Suskind reported that we had threatened to harm Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s kids. It was the sort of story you hope is not true. (And, of course, I was denounced for taking note of it since some readers reject stories which originate from ritually impure sources.

But, come to find out, there is more evidence for it emerging (I await the spectacle of torture defenders laughing off tormenting and terrorizing frightened children as “just like Halloween” or some such rubbish).

A reader remarks:

“This is America! We do not F’ing torture prisoners!”

One other point, it is better to be the America my mother and Father both defended in WWII, the America that German troops would abandon their posts and travel dozens of miles under fire to surrender to, rather than surrender to Russian, French or British troops, than to be the America these cowards and bullies have tried with too much success to make us.

And cowards they are. “Terrorism is an existential threat!” “We could have lost LA!”
Any excuse the Feds want to cook up is good enough to abandon liberty and make ourselves into the Soviet Union II.

Another remarks on the “terrorizing 7 and 9 year olds” story:

There was a time when we could have read this and said, “Yeah, and Mossad flew the planes into the Twin Towers.

And a third says:

It is like the freaking throwing-them-out-of-airplanes rumor. Six or seven years ago it seemed like we could have laughed the accusation off the stage. Now anything we hear like this is troubling, no matter how thin the evidence.

Yeah, especially when we come to discover that the torture memos inadvertantly revealed that a number of prisoners have been “disappeared“. Where are they? Who knows? But you can be sure of one thing: a regime that tortures prisoners, lies about it, lies about saving LA via torture in order to justify the torture, terrorizes 7 and 9 year old children and tortures prisoners in order to create a casus belli for war is not likely to have big qualms about dumping a few bodies somewhere if they need to.

Over at Inside Catholic, the usual excuses and arguments are being made, including a stirring defense of the compatibility with catholic teaching of crushing a nine-year-old boy’s testicles, various nutty denials that we do not torture (and besides it works) and all the disgraceful crap that has been so common on the Right in its corruption and moral dementia. I wonder how long it will be before this madness passes. I believe more and more that prayer and fasting, not just argument, will have to be the weapons of our warfare. These are strongholds and principalities, not mere human folly.

I’m a Platonist at heart. I keep thinking evil can be dealt with my sufficient reasoning. Ultimately evil requires crucifixion and resurrection. Stupid me.