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
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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.