Watching Countdown right now, listening to the discussion of the CIA inspector general's report, knowing all I already do, I am still sickened by it all. I am sickened by the continued defense offered by Dick Cheney, I am sickened that prisoners died, I am sickened that there is even a debate.
Worst of all, though, I'm sickened by the people who did this, and that is the true topic of this post.
More on the other side....
As an intelligent, educated human being, I know that there are bad people out there, psychopaths who get their biggest joy from inflicting pain upon others. I know that we cannot rid the world of evil. But what I suppose astounds me most about this situation is that these were not terrorists, random psychopathic individuals inflicting this pain upon random human beings. Instead, these were soldiers, CIA officers, contractors, people doing a job.
A job. They were hired to fight for our nation, to gather intelligence, to do many things. Torture was not part of the deal, yet when told to do it, they did it. They faced captured men and women, many of whom were innocent in the end, and were chained, shackled, handcuffed. Men and women who could not fight back. There is a basic humanity that is supposed to stop us from taking advantage of this situation, that is supposed to keep us from becoming animals, and yet it was shockingly absent here.
These representatives of our nation beat, starved, drowned, raped, in short, tortured human beings. They did this in the false hope that some useful information would come from this, despite the warnings of professionals that torture never yields reliable information. They did this despite the fact that it was, no matter the legal gymnastics of Jay Bybee and John Yoo, illegal. They did this despite the fact most of these people were innocent. They did this, most of all, despite the fact that these are thinking, rational human beings. They knew what they were doing. They had doctors involved in these interrogations. They planned their torture.
How? How did these people sleep at night? How could they stand above these people they tortured and not be filled with the overwhelming urge to vomit? How could they face a mirror, let alone these people they tortured, because they were in the same room day in and day out for months? My mind screams aloud, unable to comprehend, to digest how humans can perpetrate these atrocities upon others, especially rational ones? What rationale explains this? What safety is worth this?
As much as the right wants to shout about how we're prosecuting those who kept us safe, the fact is that such things never keep us safe, much the same way that the Holocaust and attacking Europe never kept Germany safe, much the same way that the Soviet Union's swallowing of its Western neighbor nations never made them safe. Torture is the hallmark of barbarism, and America is not a barbaric nation, nor have we ever been, but because for seven years, the representatives of our nation, the leaders of our nation, decided it was rational to act like barbarians, and has now sullied our hard-won reputation around the world as a defender of freedom.
So, yes, investigation and prosecution is necessary, if only to get an answer to the one question that no one in their right mind has the answer to, and that is how do they live with themselves?