Torture in the United States: The buried truth

Huddle in silence and you can hear the deafening tick coming from the consciousness of Americans counting down the approval rating for President Bush. Stealing his first election was one thing. Fabricating dangers to go to war without merit is another. Sketchy campaigning to win re-election is something else. All of these are mildly acceptable in the eyes of Americans. This is a country founded on genocide, xenophobia, racism, and religion after all. Passive corruption, overtly aggressive violence without merit or meaning, and religious fanaticism are not just trends of the American psyche; they are tenets of the 'American dream.'

Unchecked tyrannical action and unapologetic evil are not American in any way. Secret prisons in other countries sound much more 'red-scare Communist Russia' than American. We put 120,000 Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during World War Two; however, we called them internment camps and no longer speak of them in our history books. That was our dirty past, much like our illegal military action in nearly every Latin American country. We're better now. We've been cleansed. Or at least those countries have been cleansed of Communism and our problem simply seems to have gone away. Or has it?

Arizona Senator John McCain, a formerly tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam, has been pushing to pass a law forbidding American use of torture. The White House does not agree with these ideals. Apparently we cannot be banned from using torture. This seems odd considering recent developments out of the Bush think tank. Perhaps I should simply say the Bush speak tank: "We do not torture."

These are words President Bush used to respond to claims that the CIA had secret prisons in Eastern Europe and Asia. He did not confirm the existence of the prisons or deny the existence of the prisons. He simply defended America's right to gather information useful to protect itself against plots to harm America and stated that anything to that end is within the law. His proclamations came ironically enough during his visit to Panama.

Panama is a small Latin American country once ruled by Manuel Noriega. Noriega was an "outstanding" graduate of the Schools of America. SOA is a training program at Fort Benning, Georgia where the American military trains foreign nationals in operations which would be illegal for Americans to carryout. Noriega was paid 100 thousand dollars a year from the (gasp) CIA from 1970-1976. The director of the CIA was George H.W. Bush (the present president's father) who in '76 gave Noriega a VIP tour of the CIA. Removed from the CIA payroll by the Carter Administration, the Reagan-Bush Administration placed him back on the payroll when they came into office.

This sounds like a man who is presently in the White House in Washington and his Iraqi friend Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi is meeting with senior Bush officials even though he had reportedly supplied much of the false pre-war information leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Like father, like son. Chalabi for years resided on the Pentagon's payroll for information he gathered and provided. And we find ourselves having come full circle from espionage to espionage and torture to torture.

"We do not torture." Interesting. If the pattern continues soon we will forget and our history books will not record Abu Ghraib; they will not record Guantanamo Bay; they will not record secret prisons in former Communist countries. Eventually it all gets enveloped and forgotten, placed somewhere where only government officials will be able to peruse the past to reuse in their present. If it ends, it won't end, but if it ends it will require a reinvention of roles. What it means to be a citizen cannot stay as a passive being if the world is to change in any way. Otherwise we will slowly believe so boldly stupid a statement as, "We do not torture." Wait until tomorrow, when you'll see it happen again. Already, there are reports coming out that we've been using chemical weapons in Iraq.