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When We Torture, So What?
Principles, Conscience Fall To War On Terror

A new book by one of the nation's most highly regarded reporters reveals definitively that the United States has engaged in torture and false imprisonment.

The news is that this is not news.

We're not shocked. We're not outraged. We'd not even given pause.

That's how far we've fallen. We are no longer a nation of laws, but of fear and of men. The war on terror has cost us thousands of precious human lives. Yet that's not the worst of it. It's also cost us our national principles. Now, it seems, it has cost us our national conscience.

We're losing this war to ourselves. That's usually how wars are lost.

We say this: Sometimes you must rise above your abstract, impractical principles. Laws are merely words. High-minded words won't do you much good when someone is willing to kill himself to destroy you. War is hell, haven't you heard?

We accept the unconstitutional invasions of our innocent telephonic privacies so that Cheney's war council might be able to eavesdrop on an occasional terrorist. We accept the absurd contrivance of our misnamed Justice Department, the one that cleaned out U.S. attorneys who wouldn't engage in partisan domestic prosecutions and that says it's not torture if you're trying to get information -- that it's only torture if you're doing it for your own perverse amusement.

We have sold out our national moral imperatives to our fears, our Constitution to this "new paradigm" and our country to our enemies abroad and our greater enemies inside our own White House.

We're all torturers. We knew that already. We don't want to think about it. But we're willing to live with it. And the death of an American ideal is worth an occasional headline, surely.

John Brummett

Dave P. sent a photo of the Ramona Anniversary protest which included this sign I painted back in feb of '07:

'On the Beach' is a great novel by Nevil Shute written in 1957. He also wrote the book 'A Town Like Alice' which included the subject of torture.

'On the Beach' is about the results of nuclear war. In the book the war is started by Albania and Egypt. The US mistakes the Egyptian bombers for Russians and attacks Russia. China attacks Russia in a land grab. Over 4,700 nuclear bombs explode and the population of the Northern Hemisphere is wiped out by the blasts and the radioactive fallout.

The fallout spreads south eventually killing the last remaining people in South America, southern Africa and finally Australia.

from todays news: Local Nuke War Would Cause World Havoc

I love this part about the "media". remember this is from 1957:

page 229

"Couldn't anyone have stopped it?"

"I don't know . . . . Some kinds of silliness you just can't stop," he said. "I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them t drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there's not much that you or I can do about it. the only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness."

"But how could you have done that, Peter? I mean, they'd all left school."

page 230

"Newspapers," he said. "You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough."

She did not fully comprehend his reasoning. "I'm glad we haven't got newspapers now," she said. "It's been much nicer without them."