Ve Haff Veys in America

By Dan Hagen

No one announces that he's evil.

Deceptive, moral-sounding, sophist language is used to disguise the actual practice of evil. So instead, when People intend to commit mass murder and torture helpless people, they use terms like “targeted killing,” “shock and awe” and “enhanced interrogation.”

Or, as the right wingers' true spiritual ancestors put it, “Ve haff veys of making you talk.”

We executed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding as war crime torturers. Then, during the Bush administration, we became war criminals practicing that same torture. Then, during the Obama administration, we failed to prosecute those war crimes. Now we learn that the Bush administration was in a panic to make sure that their own knowledge of their war crimes never saw the light of day.

Unpunished torture, unpunished trillion-dollar financial fraud, unpunished spying on ordinary citizens, unpunished election fraud, unpunished ocean-poisoning, unpunished war-making based on lies — the so-called “rule of law” is something that the ruling class has risen above. Law and ethics are for the peasants, fictions to keep them in line, out of the way and ripe for further exploitation.

You know, at the point at which you find that you have just blown a bunch of children to bits, or tortured a helpless prisoner, or urinated on dead bodies to further hurt the grieving friends and relatives of people you have killed, or slaughtered a bunch of unarmed civilian men, women and children you are supposedly trying to “help,” you should seriously consider the possibility that you have become a thing of evil.

A CIA assessment warned the Bush-Cheney administration in 2002 that up to a third of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored that and subjected them to imprisonment and torture anyway. Who cares, right?

So that’s what we're talking about: the torture and secret, permanent imprisonment of innocent people by the U.S. government. But I guess it’s all okay, if somebody else somewhere decapitated somebody sometime, eh? As long as the helpless people you torture and execute are kind of brown and talk funny.

Americans willfully ignore the obvious fact that torture actually isn’t used to produce intelligence in some ridiculous comic-book scenario about a ticking time bomb. It is used by authoritarian governments to produce false confessions that justify their criminal plans, silence their opponents and consolidate their power.

Basing your ethical views of torture on a Hollywood ticking-time bomb scenario is about as intelligent and realistic as limiting your culinary choices to the menu available to the Donner Party.

Anybody remember José Padilla? This American citizen was arrested in Chicago on May 8, 2002, on “suspicion” of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack. Bush designated him an “enemy combatant” without legal rights and had him transferred to a military prison where he was tortured insane. The phony “dirty bomb” claims were dropped, and the now-mentally disordered Padilla was finally convicted in civilian court on criminal conspiracy charges.

We long ago have reached the point where torture “protects the troops,” but incontrovertible evidence of American war crimes "endangers the troops." That's the point at which I have to ask what these much-protected troops are supposed to be protecting, because it sure as hell isn't the United States of America.

The right wingers want to torture people not because it’s effective — it isn't, particularly — but because they LIKE the idea. They relish the notion of inflicting excruciating pain on helpless people, because that would prove to them that they are powerful.

They are always desperate to prove they are powerful, because they are secretly so afraid of life, of change, of the world, of reality.

Like all great bullies, they believe they are weak, and are terrified of that fact. The extent of the agony they want to inflict on others is a reflection of the depth of fear and weakness that they dare not examine in themselves.

One of the few times you can be sure these right wingers are being completely honest is when they are laughing at someone being tortured.

Former Republican Sen. John Danforth observed that the recent GOP debates have been terrible because of all the cheers for execution, torture, the slaying of illegal aliens and letting people without medical insurance die. He said they have been contrary to Christianity, something I don't care about but he does, being an ordained Episcopal priest.

Fox News Business Host Eric Bolling asked his viewers to list people they’d like to see tortured, and of course they said Joy Behar, President Obama and Senate Democrats, among others. Note that this ISN'T even about torture falsely described as an intelligence necessity, but about the REAL reason right wingers love it — as a sadistic, entertaining punishment of their innocent enemies. The mask slips, and the fascist skull grins out. Thanks for proving my point, Fox News.

Not that Obama is blameless here, as on many issues. He abandoned the public option and the disastrous Bush tax cuts for the rich without even an attempt at a fight (and has not rescinded them yet, for all his talk). After promising to march with unions, he abandoned them as targets for GOP destruction, and hasn't even used the bully pulpit to defend them. He refuses to prosecute the Wall Street crooks who wrecked the world economy, and in fact keeps them on as advisers. He has asserted a president’s power to summarily assassinate American citizens. He shields torturers. He shields war criminals.

But there’s still a difference between failing to prosecute a criminal conspiracy, and planning and executing one.

The Republican Party, the party of corporate liberty and individual serfdom, has so far gifted us with legalized torture, the corporate nullification of democratically elected city governments, police state spying on Americans, permanent war, indefinite imprisonment without legal rights and an economy wrecked by deregulated fraud.

And the Republicans claim we are still unsafe because we have too many rights left. A little more of their kind of “liberty,” and we’ll all be slaves, if we’re not dead.

The rank-and-file right wingers are moral cowards, willing to scrap every standard of civilization and torture people, both the guilty and the innocent, just because they have soiled themselves in panic over the danger of terrorism.

Yes, the U.S. will experience more terrorist attacks at some time. I would prefer that the people who face those attacks be the decent citizens of a democratic republic, not craven, morally bankrupt torturers who have squandered the promise and abandoned the meaning of their ancestors' heroic struggle.

The use of torture corrupts the society that permits it, swiftly or gradually, but inevitably and completely.