Are We So Morally Sick That We Are Willing To TORTURE In Name Of America?

[kpete]

Posted on Sun, Oct. 01, 2006email thisprint this
TORTURE
Are we so morally sick? Have we lost our bearings?

BY ARIEL DORFMAN

DURHAM, N.C. -- It still haunts me, the first time -- it was in Chile, in October of 1973 -- that I met someone who had been tortured. To save my life, I had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy some weeks after the coup that had toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a government for which I had worked. And then, suddenly, one afternoon, there he was. A large-boned man, gaunt and yet strangely flabby, with eyes like a child, eyes that could not stop blinking and a body that could not stop shivering.

That is what stays with me -- that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell in the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory.

......................

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the ''intelligence'' that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be that hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering?

Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean-American writer and professor at Duke University, is author of Death and the Maiden.

more at:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/15641045.htm

[C_U_L8R]

1. we are not.

but the kiddy porn republicans get all steamy over torture.

[seabeyond]

2. yes,.. but what i found works. we rape children ot get information

from parents. to just say torture does not effect the republican. to be blunt and say you ok rape of children in fornt of parent to get information or sticking lightbulb up a mans ass is ok..... that makes them stop. and actually think. then i went on to tell the repug, for us to finally say out loud torture is ok after dehumaninizing the iraqi, human nature allows us to do that with all we oppose. we have just brought torture to our shore. if we are ok to torture an iraqi by dehumanizing them, we are not far from looking at the american citizen that disagrees with leaders and saying the are unamerican. dehumanizing them. and torturing them. that is what happens when we allow ourselves to cross the line

this argument works, even with the fox watcher

[Ksec]

3. America lives on slogans and soundbites.

The opposition seems to be better at that than we are. Sad but true IMO.

[knowbody0]

4. me fears the possibilities

that there are those who walk among us whose NEED to torture is embedded in their DNA.

Most of us are sickened by the mere thought of torture and when it's been proven know it is nothing less than pure evil.

They say that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. what is being done in our name is also being done to us. A cold chill that cannot be comforted dwells in us from the knowing of it all.

Death and the Maiden was an amazing film.

[indepat]

5. Answer to the captioned question: You got that right for we the people

will almost certainly return almost all who voted for torture, suspension of habeas corpus, one person the solitary decider and who stand for re-election to another term of office.

[BeHereNow]

7. And THAT is the point. EXACTLY.

You have nailed it squarely.
Now, what is that definition of insanity again?
Something about doing the same thing over and
over with the expectation of obtaining different results?


BHN:hide:

[indepat]

10. Insanity know no bounds

[Golden Raisin]

6. Yes. And then blithely

yawn and switch channels from "Lost" to "NASCAR" to "American Idol" to "The Latest Adventures of Paris Hilton" to "Missing White Girl in Aruba". Throw in a bitch session on gas prices, a rant on gay marriage and a 'Praise Jesus' and you've got it.

[BlooInBloo]

8. As long as they have brown skin. Duh.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

9. What do you mean "we", Paleface?

NT