President Obama defended the CIA’s Bush-era torturers on the grounds that we shouldn’t judge the “tough job” they had to do to prevent another attack after 9/11. “Tough”? How? Amazing how the US government can turn the torturers into victims.
Tough Job
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Chomsky’s right. Language matters.
The defense says that it was a “tough” job. Wrong word. Isn’t it? The issue isn’t about the toughness of the job. The issue is about whether the job yielded usable results. Judging by July 7, 2005’s bombing of the London Underground, no, torture doesn’t work.
But now we’re all discussed the relative merits of the difficulty of the work involved. Is anyone talking about the Geneva Conventions? Didn’t they unconditionally forbid torture? Go back: UNCONDITIONALLY. Not, except when the World Trade Center is attacked and then all bets are off. UNCONDITIONALLY.
The U.S. signed that agreement, didn’t it? But here we are, (and I mean the entire media) back-and-forthing on how hard it was for the CIA. Shouldn’t someone be grilling the Prez mercilessly? “Mr. President. You do realize the U.S. is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and you’re acknowledging that we violated them. You realize you’re supposed to honor those agreements? That it’s part of your damned job to do so? Mr. President, your predecessor faced numerous demands by his critics that he be given a brain scan to determine if he was mentally competent to perform the job. Has anyone asked you to get your head examined yet?”
Tough job extracting truth from living bodies using surgical instruments in the absence of anesthesia.
So tough it borders on impossible, being that the surgeons of veracity could not recognize truth when they see it.
My main concern about all this is the fact that nobody has been held accountable or has been “brought to justice” for the atrocities committed by the U.S.
Is there nothing that can be done in the name of the People to get Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, etal. before the World Court?????
«Amazing how the US government can turn the torturers into victims.» Hardly «amazing», Ted ; the US government may not be the most effective or efficient in the world, but when it comes to propaganda and newspeak,, Edward Louis Bernays has every reason to take pride in his epigoni. Just check out the official use of words like «democracy» and «freedom» and you’ll see what I mean….
Henri