RANGER AGAINST WAR: Tortured Logic <

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Tortured Logic


There is no such thing as a difficult dog,
only an inexperienced owner

--No Bad Dogs
, Barbara Woodhouse

I'll be all in clover and when they look you over,

I'll be the proudest fellow in the Easter parade.

--Easter Parade, Irving Berlin

______________

Nothing piques Ranger more than listening to a non-combatant sissy like Dick Cheney say that torture was necessary to preserve America's safety in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©).

He's right, of course. We should torture people like Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perl, et. al. -- all the patriotic proponents of the feel-good elective wars. Heck, the CEO's of Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater and A.I.G. could even take their turn in the barrel. Their bitchassness has earned them entre to a healthy dose of enforced reality therapy to enlighten their syphilitic brains.


Americans just don't get it, but the rest of the world has a clue. The U.S. government is a greater threat to the security of the world than is any mindlessly violent terrorists. At least the terrorist's violence has operational limits.


The U.S. government has killed untold numbers in the PWOT. We also arm the world facilitating ongoing violence, and then act incredulous when hideous violence flares up outside of our venue. For instance, the government now pisses and moans because U.S. civilian weapons end up in Mexico.


Nobody articulates the fact that the corruption rampant in Mexico is the direct result of repression and power enabled by weapons and combat vehicles provided to the Mexican government courtesy the U.S. A. A few smuggled guns is not the brunt of the problem. The U.S. officially floods the government with kill-your-citizen weapons -- that is a problem.


Yet Americans swallow the propaganda as easily as we did the necessity of the "righteous and just" torture promoted by our vaunted leaders and financed with our tax dollars.
The criminals that we elect to be our designated torture directors also do a crack job at arming anybody with just about anything, as long as it is cash on the barrel head.

Hell, shaky credit will do (we're used to risks), and if this is unavailable, we just give it to them. The U.S. is an Equal Opportunity weapons supplier. We call it foreign aid, but in reality, it is an arms dealer's wet dream.

But back to torture. It is more amusing to discuss than watching t.v., and it beats the hell out of listening to our leaders explaining how we have become accomplices in the WOT (World of Torture). As Ranger has previously stated, the torture advocates are nutless wonders lacking the courage to serve in the combat arms, but just brave enough to pimp out torture to sub-contractors. They are only giving orders, you see.


The most shameful part is that the U.S. military helped create and perpetrate this illegality.
The convenient disregard of internationally accepted concepts of decency and prohibitions against torture effectively turned the U.S. forces into state-sponsored terrorists.

Terrorists kidnap torture and kill. When done under the aegis of state, we hypocritically call it COIN. The entire War on Terror could be shrunk into one of those hooah military novels, and we could charitably call it, "When Good People do Bad Things."


Which reminds us of Rabbi Kushner's book,
When Bad Things Happen to Good People, making us wonder why no house of God inveighs against this national policy. This Christian nation seems eerily silent on the moral aspects of the conduct of these wars.

It appears that the followers of Jesus, a man tortured before being killed, do not care to address the fact that the U.S. government has done the same thing as policy. It is all so biblical, as we have washed our hands of the mess.

In a giant step for mankind, we have decided to no longer call them enemy combatants, and the wars are no longer "wars" -- they are
"Overseas Contingency Operations" (Global War on Terror is Given New Name.) There -- that feels better.

"GWOT" and "Long War" was so Old School.

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The old Army of my youth could be brutal, but it did not engage in systematic, sexually charged torture. That required university-trained psychologists, medical doctors and CIA scum.

Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 8:53:00 PM GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"This Christian nation seems eerily silent on the moral aspects of the conduct of these wars."

I take exception to this comment, Ranger.
They, us Christians, have been quite vocal on both the moral and the reason for the war...

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1010-02.htm

http://mediamatters.org/items/200502150011

By 2006

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N25168944.htm

So all told, Ranger, I wish the Christians had been silent...it would have been a hell of lot better than the cheer-leading we all performed.

And yes...we...I was one of the earlier cheer-leaders as well...right up till no WMD's were found, then I felt used and betrayed.
/sigh
I guess I'm one of the bigger fools.

Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 10:03:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger The Minstrel Boy said...

the american involvement in vietnam had a great deal of its beginnings with america wanting a market for our surplus ww2 gear. the french were hot to reclaim their colony (this after shamefully bugging out at the first hint of a threat from imperial japan, bugging out and not leaving the vietnamese with anything to mount even a token resistance with).

without truman cutting the french a deal for troop ships, arms, ammo, surplus rations, uniforms, the whole shebang on that sweetest of american deals, no money down. the french would have never been able to reoccupy vietnam, the folks of the north and the south who had been out in the jungle eating bugs and snakes and fighting the japanese with what weapons they could fabricate and steal since 38 would have been able to work something out amongst themselves.

both north and south knew one thing very well, the french had no rational claim to their country.

i have never been a torture moralist. if i had any faith in torture being a means to produce decent intell i would have made torquemada look like a pussy.

i'm a torture pragmatist. it. doesn't. work. whenever the torturers are asked to justify their claims of how effective it is they always duck behind "can't tell you it's a secret."

frankly, i don't buy that. they cite the fact that torture must work because it's been around for so long. if you take them at their word then those women who confessed to dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight in colonial salem must have really done it. that whole witch hunt wasn't the naked land and money grab by the minister and the deacon that the ledgers clearly expose it to be (one of the survivors of that was given a hearing by a crown appointed investigating judge and awarded the princely sum of six gold soveriegns, the judge paid them out of his own pocket because he didn't want to force her to wait for the long trip to draw the money from the treasury)

if torture works at producing the truth then every soldier who broke in the prison hulks during our revolution, or collaborated with the japanese guards, or signed a confession in hanoi, or korea must have been telling the truth then too.

there is no justification. there is no moral ground to defend torture, or torturers.

none.

if cheney and those cowardly motherfuckers are so convinced or the rightness of their actions, declassify all the documents, declassify all the tapes. let them defend themselves and their actions in open court.

Friday, March 27, 2009 at 2:22:00 AM GMT-5  
Blogger Lisa said...

MB,

Eloquently argued.

As an aside, isn't it amazing the permutations of cruelty that humans are capable of devising? If that same level of ingenuity could be turned to other uses. . .

(The twisted side of me imagines they could come up with a pretty tricked out, Road Warrior-esque looking Datsun. Into what else could those energies be sublimated?)

Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:43:00 PM GMT-5  

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