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Saturday, October 11. 2008
The Death of American Values
Earlier Friday I had began a column about meeting my long time friend Alan. After turning on KPBS to the documentary, Torturing Democracy, I’m just sickened.This isn’t just a collection of former prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, but former State and Defense Department officials, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who opposed the use of torture.
Our president, between five to seven years ago, authorized torture, getting around that legal term of “torture” by having lawyers redefine what is torture. Many Pentagon and State Department officials lobbied hard against the new practices, most of which were based upon military training called SERE: Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, a program that trains our soldiers and marines for possible circumstances that include being captured and tortured, one of those acts of torture being “waterboarding.”
For all his flaws, Richard Armitage, under secretary to Secretary of State Colin Powell, was rightly offended and angry by the administration’s use of torture and its rejection of U.S. law that prohibits cruel and unusual treatment.
The program offers the views of many U.S. officials, from a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who refused to prosecute a man captured and detained in Afghanistan, to lower level officers who were horrified to see torture being used against alleged terrorists.
Over 500 prisoners of Guantanamo Bay have been released after years of confinement and torture, without being charged with any crimes or given any explanation of why they were detained in the first place, many of them suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of their horrific ordeals.We have allowed our values to be flushed down the toilet by this administration and we as a nation bear responsibility for these immoral and criminal acts. As citizens we need to hold our leaders accountable, President Bush and Vice President Cheney included, and put them on trial — a legal trial, which is being denied the men in our custody—for the crimes committed in the name of fighting terrorists.
Couple that with the very recent news that NSA employees have been routinely listening in on the private conversations of U.S. citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism — even those of our service men and women serving overseas, talking to their loved ones — and storing that data for future use, it sadly is clear we have done more to damage our values than any “terrorists driving planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” in the words of one of the men assigned to interrogate detainees.
As a veteran and citizen of the United States, I am angry and feel betrayed by the people who authorized this destruction of our Bill of Rights, probably our most sacred document and made us complicit to this immorality. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
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