I was reading McJoan's recent front page diary and for some reason, a very familiar fact struck a dissonant chord, two or more sour notes that, if your ear were your mouth and the notes were milk, would be spit out.
This is what I'm talking about:
Leahy: "We knew damn well if he went to Canada he wouldn't be tortured. He'd be held and he'd be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria, he'd be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured."
What the fuck? Isn't Syria supposed to be our enemy? Aren't we itching to attack them?
more...
Oh, you're still here. Sorry, I'll pull up my pants and we'll get started.
Right then. Syria, a terrorist harboring country that acts like Lebanon's pedophilic uncle. They recently fought a proxy war with Isreal. They are good friends with the axis of evil. We accuse them of working really hard to make things worse for us in Iraq. They're "interferers" as Bush might say.
So why are we exporting our torture to them? I mean, it's bad enough that we torture, but to negotiate what is, most likely, a profitable contract with a terrorist state is something entirely different. It's doing business with terrorists is what it is. And, I happen to believe that would qualify as "supporting" terrorists, which, if I'm not mistaken, is against the law.
Am I wrong? Is this not a business transaction? I can't really prove it, but common sense would dictate that nobody is going to torture for us for free, even if it is a Canadian. Even if we have our own people there, actually conducting (another music reference!) the torture, we'd still have to rent space. Unless, of course, they let us have it for free or else we'll invade.
If we are doing business with Syria, what are we supposed to think? A good conservative might pass it off as "covert ops." They might think we sent the unwitting Canadian there to see what Syria's torture techniques were. That way, we could train our troops to resist. But, that's really dumb, because we could've just asked anybody else known to be tortured in Syria. They would be happy to tell us "what those mother fuckers did to me."
But thinking Americans (that's how I divide the populace, by the way. Republicans vs. Thinkers is a much better frame than Conservatives vs. Liberals.) will still have to assume that America is in Cahoots with Syria, a supposed enemy state that promotes the very thing we claim to be at war against, terror.
Thinking Americans have to believe that our government is breaking the very law it wrote. What the fuck?