A joke I've occasionally heard over the years, especially a week or so after Easter, is: "Q: What is the definition of eternity? A: Two people and a ham."
Tonight I propose a new, grimmer definition of that term. My definition of eternity, after spending the past hour catching up on the news that occurred today while I was at work, is: "The period of time during which we will apparently continue to learn more gruesome and indefensible truths about what took place during the Bush Administration."
I thought it had gotten as bad as it could get. I thought I could not be shown anything that would further shock me, or expand my view of the degree of evil that has been planned, carried out, and defended by those "people."
Thanks to the outstanding game of "Connect the Dots" that real American journalists have been playing today, I now know I was wrong.
I think I have this right:
DOT #1: From the beginning, Cheney wanted us to go to war with Iraq -- among other reasons, for the billions Halliburton would be able to make from the deal. There were also all the standard neocon motivations for such a war, but right now everything about Cheney is sticking in my craw something fierce, so I'm highlighting his personal role. Any other course would seem naive.
DOT #2: In order to achieve this goal, the Cheney Administration settled on the strategy of showing a connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This was the first lie, as that was not in fact the reason the Cheneyites wanted to go to war, but just the public face they wanted to put on their motivations.
DOT #3: All attempts at legitimate information-gathering failed to produce the evidence the administration was seeking. In fact, it became clearer and clearer that no such evidence could exist, because no connection existed, and the CIA told that to administration honchos.
DOT #4: Rather than acknowledge the failure of their strategy, the Expats from Hell known as the Bush/Cheney Administration chose instead to turn to non-legitimate methods of gathering intelligence -- specifically, they chose methods famously utilized during earlier periods in history for the specific purpose of obtaining false confessions from prisoners of war.
DOT #5: But there was a problem with this new strategy: it was illegal, under both domestic and international treaty law. So the next step of the process was to pervert enlist the executive branch legal staff to create, out of whole cloth, some sort of legal argument that could be seized upon to appear to justify the planned program of torture.
DOT #6: And that brings us to the next lie. The party line has been that the memos were commissioned in order to determine the legality of enhancing the interrogation techniques on prisoners who had important information that standard interrogation techniques had failed to extract. In fact, the research underlying the memos began before said dangerous prisoners were even in US custody.
DOT #7: But the purpose of the memos was to justify torture to outsiders, not to the Cheneyites themselves; they were going to torture regardless of the legality. So once they got their hands on some prisoners, they didn't bother to wait for the memos to begin torturing. We know this because in June 2002, two months before the memos were released, an FBI agent walked out on his role of observing the interrogation of a prisoner, because he believed what was being done to the prisoner was wrong. Despite being ordered by his superiors to remain and continue observing, he refused.
DOT #8: Another lie -- this one can really be seen as an auxiliary lie, because it doesn't connect directly with the chain of lies above -- is the lie that torture was used sparingly. 266 instances of waterboarding in one month. My God.
DOT #9: The final lie, of course, is the one the Spawn of Satan himself has been spewing all over the teevee with increasing frequency these past few days: that the reason for the torture was to protect us, the American people, because there were plots and schemes being hatched daily to attack us again. Thanks to the torture, says The Dick, they were able to thwart these evil plans and keep us safe -- an achievement the wimpy-assed Obama administration will not be able to replicate, because it lacks the stomach to do the tough work required.
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And unless I have misstated any of the analysis we have been hearing today, that, my fellow citizens, is what was done in our names by what has GOT to be the most immoral, destructive, un-American administration in the history of the Republic. I'm sorry if those adjectives sound sophomoric. As a published writer and former editor, I am rarely unable to find words to express what I am thinking, but that is the case here. I cannot find words strong enough to accurately describe what I think of the Bush/Cheney adminstration.
I am trying to imagine how this tale could be any more sordid than it is. But I think I must be careful not to wonder about that question too loudly. Because the last thing in this world that I want is to find out the answer.