Who We Were, And Would Yet Be

This is a pretty chilling article-about-an-article about CIA torture in a "black site" in Thailand (except, of course, as George Bush told us back then, "The US doesn't torture.) And we may look forward to R candidates, lacking anything useful to offer on the home front (and when they're not ginning up resentment among Christians so that, per usual, they'll vote against their best interest) vying for the toughest of the tough-guy images, so that it may all start again.

... The CIA interrogators said that if Zubaydah died during questioning, his body would be cremated. And if he survived the ordeal, the interrogators wanted assurances that he would "remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life." ... 

I mean, if the guy doesn't have the good grace to die while we're torturing him, then we should stash him away for life, because we have rendered him nothing more than evidence. He's the knife the killer washes off in the sink, the gun the stick-up kid throws in the river, the witness that has to die because he saw too much or knows too much. Commit the crime. Bury the evidence. These are not original thinkers there, in our intelligence community.

... Marco Rubio's alleged comeback is attributed to his tough-guy stance on the jihad menace, which Rubio summed up last weekend by quoting an action movie at a wingnut rodeo in South Carolina. Make no mistake. When they talk about this, it's about putting our national conscience back in cold storage again and returning American foreign policy to the control of the people who run the black cells, who torture people until they are little more than evidence, and then hope to hell they die.

And we've just learned, if Seymour Hersh is to be believed in his latest, torture had nothing to do with obtaining the information that led to finding bin Laden. On the other hand, the facts that torture is ineffective, diminishes us and those who do it, and pollutes the possibility of trial, will in no way lessen the lust for it on the part of today's "conservative" party and its leadership. 

There's no end to the awfulness of these people, and no amount of evidence that will open their eyes nor the ones of those who vote them into office. That time, when people thought seriously about difficult issues, when facts were considered important and expertise admirable, is as long gone as Dick Cheney's original heart.

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