Torture and the assault on values

I think I’m suffering from PTSD brought on by living under political leadership that every single day launches another assault on my humanity. There seems to be no end to the twisting and shredding of the democratic, humane principles on which I and all other USians have been taught to believe our country is founded -- and which we deeply believe it should be following.

It was bad enough when then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote the now-infamous memo declaring that the Geneva Conventions for the humane treatment of prisoners of war were “obsolete” and “quaint,” and didn’t apply to those arrested in the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror.” Suddenly torture, something that I had considered to be completely, totally and unequivocally rejected by any society calling itself civilized, was once again thinkable. Here’s an article I wrote then.

Now, we hear that not only does the US torture its war prisoners in detention centers that we know exist, like Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base and others in the battleground countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, we learn that the CIA has a gulag of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and other countries not involved in the “War on Terror,” at which it is holding and torturing prisoners no one even knows about. As Molly Ivins said in a recent column, the US spent decades fighting to destroy the USSR, the “evil empire,” with its prison camps where people labelled a threat to their way of life were sent, never to return. Now our government is doing exactly the same. How does a reasonable person make sense of this?

And that’s not all. As soon as the Washington Post ran its article about the secret prisons, Congressional leaders stood right up to demand action. But not to put an end to this appalling practice. No -- House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Bill Frist are demanding an investigation to find out who leaked this national security information to the press!

My first reaction to this was to recall that Bill Frist is an MD who presumably has taken the oath to “first do no harm.” He has, or he did when he became a doctor, dedicated his life to caring for people who are hurt or sick, and working to heal them. But this oath apparently doesn’t really mean “do no harm,” not to Dr. Frist. Not only did he put profit ahead of protecting life when he dishonestly placed his ownership of a hospital chain into a “blind trust” that really wasn’t blind, resulting in his being investigated by the Justice Department and the SEC. Now Frist wants to prosecute the person who told the Washington Post about the horrifying truth of the secret US gulag.

This while our macho-posturing president continues to mouth the words “We do not torture” and insist that the US abides by laws probhiting it. Bush continues to repeat those words while threatening to veto a defense spending bill to which the US Senate has voted 90-9 to append an explicit and complete ban on any use of torture by US agencies anywhere in the world. He repeats those words even as VP Dick Cheney openly seeks an exemption for the CIA from this ban, authored by Republican John McCain who was a POW in the Viet Nam War and was tortured at the Hanoi Hilton. Of course, our chickenhawks in power who seem to love the whole idea of torture, including VP “sometimes you have to play rough” Cheney, had “other things to do” when it was their turn to serve in the military.

Nothing means what it is supposed to mean. Torture is unthinkable, and “we do not do it,” but we do and the evidence is right in front of our eyes. We don’t torture but we can’t be bound by international or national law that prohibits it. We trust doctors to be committed to doing no harm, to protecting and preserving life, but it’s completely consistent with that humane commitment for doctors to condone and defend the disappearing and torture of human beings.

Yet there’s little outcry, hardly any response from the public.

No wonder -- people are feeling shell-shocked by the daily deceptions of the leaders they have no choice but to trust. Reeling from continual blows to the bedrock values about how civilized people treat each other and what their country’s illustrious democratic heritage actually means. Punch-drunk from the assaults on their humanity, and what is being done in their name. Dizzy from trying to sort out whether black is really white, war is really peace, lies are really the truth. So depleted of energy by trying to make sense of the horror and hold on to belief in something that they’re emotionally exhausted, struggling just to keep their balance while the world spins horribly out of control.

That’s pretty much how I feel this week.

PS I do not in any way mean to diminish the very severe and life-threatening PTSD suffered by soldiers returning from war, people who have been through or witnessed violence, children who have been abused, and so on. The PTSD I’m talking about is that described in an article I linked to my post last week, and here it is again. I think this is a very helpful way to look at the effects of US culture and especially the current regime on the psychological state of ordinary people in this country.