torture, shame, and revolution
author: theresa mitchell
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this is a portion of my prepared comments for KBOO today
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Today I'm going to talk about torture. Shortly I will have a guest, an author and compiler of essays on the subject, a legal mind, if you will. But first I'm going to just vent.
There was a certain day in September 2001, we all know the one, in which everyone who had access to videos media was obsessed, as I was, with watching buildings fall in New York, and wondering what it meant. I didn't know then, though I can state with certainty now, that the stunt had been arranged by the neocons, and that the New York buildings had been professionally detonated. I didn't know that then, but I knew the history and tendency of American elites to control the masses through fear, and to subvert democracy wherever it raised its beautiful head.
I knew Bush Junior to be the ideological successor to Reagan, who had used the grossly inflated Soviet threat to justify a dirty, death squad war against Nicaraguan and Salvadoran citizens. I knew he followed in the footsteps of Nixon's then-secret Phoenix torture and assassination program. I could see that he was an arrogant, nasty, dangerous man.
On that day, we were having a Pledge Drive here at KBOO as we are now, and we suspended that effort to perform ongoing news and analyses. It was around that time that the American people started noticing feelers from the Bushites about torture, and that absurd canard, about whether it was justified to torture a nuclear bomber, began the rounds of the conformist talk shows. Clearly, the Bush regime wanted the acceptance of the terrified US citizenry; we were to nod and gulp and accept the absurd idea that a practice that had faded away from the time of the Age of Reason was now fresh, new, and useful again.
There were those of us who resisted, but we were drowned out, not only by the corporate media, but by the terrified masses seeking quarter from the unknown. Reasonable discussions were sidelined by mysterious American-made anthrax attacks. There was never a reasonable discussion of torture, but rather a national whimper of acquiescence.
It is still difficult to talk about torture, because we are ashamed. I am ashamed to be part of a nation that is so far from reason, so far from compassion, so ignorant of history as to condone torture. And torture has festered along with every conceivable breach of the rule of law, so that we are engaged in wars based on lies, our secret police roam the globe to kidnap people, our own soldiers perish from uranium poisoning—and then there are the concentration camps. Here is a sample from Wayne Madsen, published today:
"So too are the three U.S. secret concentration camps now in Ethiopia. According to our Ethiopian opposition sources, the main camp is located at the Ethiopian airbase at Debre Zeit, near Addis Ababa. The two others are in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia and in Tigre Province, which borders Eritrea in the north. Tigre is the home of the Ethiopian dictator Meles. The camps are housing detainees from 19 countries, including Sweden, France, and Canada and a number of Ethiopian opposition members, including ethnic Oromos, Ogadenis, and other minority groups."
I won't ask if this news makes anyone feel safe, because if it does, it only adds to my contempt for those so comforted. No one has a right to feel safe by torturing others—and does anyone doubt that death and torture are an essential component of those Ethiopian camps, and of the numerous clandestine dungeons that our secret police now maintain around the globe?
Where now can our loyalty attach? Can we, in good conscience, pledge allegiance to a regime that unceasingly promotes terror, torture, imprisonment, and murder? Doesn't that flag reek of blood and filth? Hold it to year ear, can you hear the screams of the hordes of children we have mutilated and orphaned? Run it up a flagpole, does it not suck the color from the landscape?
The time has come for a clean break, for revolution against elitism, against corporate rule. It is time for building a new society, for tearing down dungeons. We can have an open, transparent, tolerant, generous society, or we can sit idly, and watch everything rot until the world finally shrugs us off like lice.
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THANKS FOR BRINGING THIS TO THE TABLE WERE ARMERICA
CAN CHOOSE TO BE OUTRAGED or IGNORE THIS REPORT
I was unaware of the US camps in Ethiopia.
This crap is so wrong it is unacceptable
I will update my website with the info!
Thanks for your efforts "I AM LISTENING!"
More on Torture from my website here -->
TRYING TO STOP TORTURE BY THE USA
How Low Can We Go?
~ joe anybody