Stealing Democracy

I was privileged last night that our local PBS station aired the documentary "Torturing Democracy". No question, it is brutally upfront about the hideous things that our employees, military and civilian, did to Guantanamo 'detainees'.

While doing that, those who had objected, made the effort to end it, and were cut off from the frontlines when they did so, pointed to the Vice President's office. Snarlin' Darth is shown as essentially signing the papers.

The office of president is too much exonerated by this claim, because it is there that the power resides. I feel that the documentary glanced away from the actual criminal, and that is the actual occupant of the White House. Without that vacuous cowboy imitator there would have not been any torture. It took appealing to bravado combined with feelings of inferiority. That combined with false intelligence produced, for these historically criminal operatives, the agreement they got.

I feel that when the cretin in chief now whines that he blames our invasion of Iraq on bad intelligence, that he's half truthful. As always, he was spoonfed what his minions wanted, and whether it was Darth or Rummy or Brown or Rice, he was responsible for the final choice. He was manipulated and he served their purpose, but personal inadequacy is not an adequate excuse for the attempts to redeem himself. He is the deciderer, and now he wants to blame his decision on the persuasiveness of evidence he was given rather than on his essential brutishness.

That said, we have to face the fact that there were boots on the ground that did these hideous things. People who are capable of tying up, freezing and burning, slapping around and gouging, leaving men in pain in their own waste, and the rest - these are not Jane and Johnny. They were Jane and Johnny under orders, and under pressure, being told they were responsible for saving the country. Of course, they were damaging their country. They were lied to. While I have heard about the techniques used to harden soldiers so that they can kill, men have come home from war and killing and turned back into gentlemen. We don't cringe away from the soldiers who return from Guantanamo and we shouldn't.

The men and women who served their country were not asking to be confronted with orders to get information by any means, and then told that the best way to get that information to save the country was by the lowest behavior anyone is capable of. The image of soldier, the martial music, the parade stance, these have a purpose; it is part of an ethic, that anything and everything is asked of you to serve your country. The service itself is presented as honorable and decent.

We're that country. It's our duty to make sure that the ones giving the orders are decent human beings, and that they carry out the country's ideals. Mixing that up with cheap imitators, perpetrators of a vile view of our national honor was wrong of us.

Although you readers and I fought against it, we're going to have to try harder. Our country is never going to be clean of this stain. We have to teach the generations growing up that they need to be on guard against the cheap tricks, the lies, the nastiness and basic inhumanity of those who want to warp our system. Democracy demands it. Otherwise, by misleading us, the war criminals steal democracy.

Like the self-proclaimed deciderer, the last choice belongs to us. We have to fight like hell to make it the correct one.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.