March 2009

We Do Not Torture  

On February 24, 2009, President Obama gave his first address to Congress and the American people. It was meant to reassure the battered, near-corpse of a tortured nation that help was on the way. It was also a message to the world. He reiterated his pledge to close our Devil’s Island on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and stated, “And that is why I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture.” And yet, just one month earlier, President Obama signed, January 22, 2009 Executive Order, into law. It sanctions, aids, and legally permits federal authorities to identify, capture, transport and detain suspects in prisons of foreign countries where torture is both legal and procedural. No, the United States of America does not torture, but its client states do.

In John Orwell’s, 1984 the term doublethink referred to the thought process of a person who no longer said what he thought, but thought the opposite of what was true. It was the negation of self, the endorsement of Big Brother and the Party. It was the one act of submission necessary to capture and control the mind of the sane and well-adjusted citizen of Oceania. O’Brien, the interrogator repeated the same question to Winston, the suspect-citizen undergoing rehabilitation. He would hold up four of his five fingers and ask, “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” Finally, after prolonged interrogation, agonizing torture, and continual brainwashing, Winston submitted. He began to believe that he saw five fingers, as he was required, even though he only saw four. It marked the end of his person and the triumph of state power over humanity.

“… the United States of America does not torture.” Why not say, the United States of America does not pollute? On the scales of truth and justice the terms of deniability would carry the same weight. Since when did America not torture? America was christened in the 1600s with the New England Witchcraft trials that led to indiscriminate lynching, burning at the stake, suffocating, and drowning in tubs, rivers and lakes. America had already begun its three hundred years of institutionalized slavery, itself a tortured history. In 1902 Mark Twain wrote correspondence back from the Philippine-American War of 1899-1913 that expressed his revulsion and repudiation of the American Army General Funston and his water-cure— what they then called water-boarding. It was used all too often on captured and detained Philippine nationals who resisted the American invasion and occupation. When the WWII Japanese military practiced the same water-boarding on captured American soldiers, they were tried as war criminals and sentenced to life in prisons at hard labor. What about us? On June 16, 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union was successful under the Freedom of Information Act to force the Pentagon to release more than 1,000 pages and documents detailing the torture of prisoners held by US troops from 2003 to 2005.

“…the United States does not torture.” Just to hear this, is torture. It tortures the language and mind of a free people. A free people require truth. It is a blow to civil and human dignity. It compounds the crimes of torture with the sarcastic criminality of denial. It shows blatant contempt for the intelligence and integrity of the American people. We know we torture. To pretend we do not torture is to admit that the lie is greater than the truth. It revokes our own credibility and presents a new and chronic dissatisfaction, something that eats and gnaws at the conscience. The believer now stands watch over their own internal humanity. The obedient guard against this truth, the truth of their own senses, their only connection with the real world. The believer is now his and her own censor, his and her own jailer, and a metaphysical keeper of the state’s secret. In this system, truth is not a measure of fact, but of faith in the dogma and belief in its lies. It is a cruel, inhuman, and degrading application of bovine behaviorism onto a public either too dumb to know or too dumb to care.

In 2007, the President of Iran, Mahmuoud Ahmadinejad stood before an audience at Columbia University and said that Iran does not have homosexuals like in America. Hundreds of people reacted with jeers and laughter. Imagine Presidents Bush or Obama standing before an Iranian audience of students, journalists, professors, and cable news cameras to say that America does not torture. Not only would there be jeers and laughter, but the stage would be crushed by the onrush of actual victims tortured while in American hands. For citizens of America to agree that the United States of America does not torture, or to know but not care, is to confess that we are a defeated people and a defeated nation. Confession and compliance is the whole intent of torture. What is true or false no longer matters. Soon, nothing, not even oneself matters. In this way, the American people have become the ultimate co-dependent, the battered spouse, abused child, and tortured victim. While tied to our chairs and beaten senseless by senseless wars and blunt, maniacal policies of crazed rightwing fundamentalists, the corporate run government of thieves, privateers and Wall Street bandits have robbed the American people blind, as blind as their own blind faith, bound to interest on debt for seven generations.

“…the United States of America does not torture.” Why should it, they have already done their job. They got what they wanted. They won. We are a frightened, depraved nation; a nation of bullies, cowards and liars. America does not run on oil. It runs on fear. Torture is the truncheon, the whip; it is the device, the method of depravation, but fear is its goal. It has become America’s number one industry, its new natural resource, an endless and renewalable supply that requires no heavy machinery to cut anything down, harvest, or mine; no middlemen or lawyers necessary to drill, transport, package or store. It is the golden trough that feeds the federal budget, determines spending, and heats up interest. It is the oil and gears of the machine, it programs and lights up the entire high-tech super-stealth military-industrial complex. Fear is the fuel and engine of insurance, health care, banking and high-finance. It is drilled and tapped for home products, advertising, police, lawyers, prisons, and churches. Fear is the fruit of all torture. It is the collar of the dog, the cow, and the slave. A society that fears is a subverted, beaten, tortured nation. A free and a fearless nation cannot and does not torture or lie.

Step through the looking glass and ask if it is possible to corral a particular population, give them a demographic and label them consumers. Can they be farmed, fed and brought to market like any other industrialized herd? In just one year, Stalin showed how to drive an entire nation, The Ukraine, into near diabolical extinction by simply removing all food from farms, villages, city shelves and stores. It was the 1932-33 Holodomor, or Hunger Plague that killed 10,000,000 Ukrainians. Is it also famine when a demographic is not starved to death, but kept malnourished enough to promote a lingering, long-term cash crop of ills? A money loop would pass between Agribusiness, Pharmaceuticals, Medicine, Insurance, and Markets.

Agribusiness brings low cost, low nutrition, high-profit processed foods to market. People purchase and eat these adulterated foods, become malnourished, lose their health and become ill. Now they enter the medical stream of doctors, pharmaceuticals, hospitalization and insurance. In the last twenty years obesity has risen to kill 300,000 Americans annually. Together, heart disease and cancers kill another million or more a year. And yet, the continual number one cause of death and injury in the United States remains medical mistakes. When combined with pharmaceutical fatalities due to correctly prescribed FDA-approved drugs, the tolls range between 300,000 deaths to what the 2003 National Institute of Aging reported to be, 784,000 preventable deaths annually due to medical, hospital, and pharmaceutical error.

Can these figures, when taken together over a five or ten year period be called, if not a genocide, a democide? It comes from the word, demographic. A political scientist named R. J. Rummel coined the term for the murder of any person or people by government including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. Democide can also include deaths arising from the reckless and depraved disregard for life

such as forced mass starvation, or perhaps, mass debilitation. Rummel’s research claims that six times as many people died of democide during the 20th century than in all that century’s wars combined. So I ask, is it possible to create a democide not through scarcity and starvation, but through a well designed oversupply of fake foods and false advertising? Can a population eat itself to death through a fatally deficient diet, by the habitual intake of foods deficient in quality and nutrition, simply carriers of herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, food additives, preservatives, untested genetic modifications, fast-foods, and an endless anxiety of sugar-coated hunger and glut? Couple this with a medical system that has treatments and prescriptions for everything that ails, distresses and diseases the man, woman and child, and the harvest is astronomical. Can this be considered torture or terror on a scale so massive, so deceptive, so predatory, and so monetized, that it has not yet been identified? Perhaps, psycho-econocide? The United States of America may not torture, but given the statistics, what about our corporations?

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” In this category falls the issue of rape — a well documented weapon of war and tool of torture. It so happens that the United States of America leads the world in the numbers of rape. We are ahead by double of our second place rival, South Africa. In 2007, America produced 250,000 victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. This figure does not include victims 12 years old or younger which adds an additional 15%. Today, there are 18 million American women who have been victims of attempted or completed rape. On the other hand, how many rapists does that make, what percentage of American men are rapists? Under conventions set forth by the United Nations, rape is torture. It means that 17-18% of American women have been tortured and a similar percentage of men are torturers. Add America’s murder rates, its violent crimes, its infant mortality rates, and its burgeoning prison industry, and America’s shinning no torture light gets a little shady, even dark.

So now, we may believe President Obama when he says, “… I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture.” We may believe that we do not torture others, we do not torture each other, nor ourselves, children, animals, nor the earth or water. We do not pollute, either. The fact that 100% of all America’s freshwater fish are too toxic to eat is not a matter of ecocidal madness, democidal maniacs, or people who hate fish. We simply do not pollute. It would be unpatriotic to think otherwise and against our beliefs. Besides, even The Constitution and The Bill of Rights folded under the torture given to it by the Patriot Act of 2001, the Patriot Act II of 2003, and the Military Commissions Act of 2008. Now, a mere whisper of doubt or hint of critical thought is enough to make oneself a suspect. Imagine sitting in a bare room with an overhead lamp, a table with three large cardboard boxes of your accumulated emails, internet searches, credit card transactions, and telephone transcripts. Two muscled goons with iron bars and baseball bats stand next to you. A third, funny looking fellow sits across from you. He is sweating, wearing glasses and is uncomfortable in a shirt size too small and buttoned too tight around his neck. He says there has been some talk about your interests and attitudes and he has some routine questions regarding your loyalties. He then asks if there is anything in those boxes you would like to talk about before he takes a look, and before he sends you to Syria or Croatia for more questions. This is how easy, how simple it all becomes, the way it works in Orwell’s, Oceania.

Franklin D. Roosevelt made his intentions known in his 1941 State of the Union address. He said that all Americans must be guaranteed four essential freedoms. The freedom of speech, publication, and assembly; the freedom of, and from religion; the freedom from want; and the freedom from fear. It is something he and his generations struggled and fought hard to bring into being, to defend, and leave as their legacy to us. We said, no. What we could not sell off, we gave away. We prefer to make-believe, or just watch it on the TV. Blame it on the torture — we asked for it.