I have to say that Peter Beinart at the Atlantic has one of the more powerful pieces Ive seen on the torture controversy and what to make of the responses to the torture report. Its probably the anti-exceptionalist essay of the year. Heres just a taste. Tom Torture, declared President Obama this week, in response to the newly released Senate report on CIA interrogation, is contrary to who we are. Maine Senator Angus King added that, This is not America. This is not who we are. According to Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth, We are better than this. No, actually, we’re not. There’s something bizarre about responding to a 600-page document detailing systematic U.S. government torture by declaring that the real America—the one with good values—does not torture. It’s exoneration masquerading as outrage. Imagine someone beating you up and then, when confronted with the evidence, declaring that I’m not really like that or that wasn’t the real me. Your response is likely to be some variant of: It sure as hell seemed like you when your fist was slamming into my nose. A country, like a person, is what it does. The implication of the statements by Obama, King, and Yarmuth is that there is an essential, virtuous America whose purity the CIA defiled. But that’s silly. Aliens did not invade the United States on 9/11. In times of fear, war, and stress, Americans have always done things like this. In the 19th century, American slavery relied on torture. At the turn of the 20th, when America began assembling its empire overseas, the U.S. army waterboarded Filipinos during the Spanish-American War. As part of the Phoenix Program, an effort to gain intelligence during the Vietnam War, CIA-trained interrogators delivered electric shocks to the genitals of some Vietnamese communists, and raped, starved, and beat others. America has tortured throughout its history... After 9/11, while George W. Bush was announcing that God had deputized America to spread liberty around the world, his government was shredding the domestic and international restraints against torture built up over decades, and injecting food into inmates’ rectums. Those actions were not “contrary to who we are.” They were a manifestation of who we are. And the more we acknowledge that, the better our chances of becoming something different in the years to come. theatlantic/international/archive/2014/12/torture-is-who-we-are-cia-report/383670/
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 14:00:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015