We Torture.

(The following is the last four paragraphs from a very extended rant by the illustrious Hunter at dailykos.com. You can find the rest of the column here. =mike=)

There is absolutely no pride to be gained in no longer torturing, but blocking justice in those instances in which we have. It is no act of courage; it is no enlightened position. It is merely the easiest path, and the one followed in nearly every instance by nations proven to have committed foul acts. Sorry, but we're not about to do anything about it. We'll stop, but in exchange for stopping we expect the episode to be forgotten. What would count as a war crime for you other countries counts for us as an internal matter, and we consider it closed.

I do not feel like begging. After years of railing against the practice (to be largely ignored, because in those days the majority of voices presumed torture to have positive effects, and therefore be justified), after years of government denial that any such thing was happening (in spite of clear and demonstrable evidence that it did), the last thing in the world that I feel like doing is once again begging, at long last, and to the supposed reasonable people that replaced the last reasonable people, that we actually follow our own goddamn laws, or treat crimes by our powerful with the same grave manner as we do crimes by anyone else in the nation.

I am fucking sick of it, and I am fucking sick of hearing how we have entered a new age of enlightenment merely because we have stopped a transparently abominable practice, one that we condemn with vigor when undertaken by any other nation. I am fucking sick of myself, my compatriots and the rest of the public having to act as collective conscience for all those in power that, apparently, have long since evolved past even common sense, much less common shame.

I know by tomorrow or next week I will relent, and I will start the cause anew, and I will join all the others in penning yet another fervent message explaining why, at long last -- at long fucking last -- we cannot simultaneously condemn torture and yet declare a casual, dismissive amnesty for all those that ordered it, and planned it, and justified it, and executed it, under the usual theory of the powerful that crimes by the powerful simply cannot be prosecuted lest chaos or embarrassment ensue.

But for today, I can only say damn you all to hell. Damn you all for making us -- us, of all people, average citizens with no positions of power, with no power at all save whatever we can wring out of the thin air, and with nothing at stake but a sense of shared, basic, foundational morality -- yet again rail for our own country to exercise a shred of the morality, the justice, the national greatness that it professes for all to hear. I was once outraged; I was, after that, ashamed; now I am only incredulous. With every passing day my nation acts less like a guiding beacon, and more like a crook.

=mike=