GETTING THE WORD OUT, ONE TORTURE AT A TIME

In a Newsweek (August 9, 2004, p. 37) report about abuse of prisoners in Iraq, we read the following: “Some on the commission also believe that Rumsfield and senior officials failed early on to set up clear, baseline rules for interrogations—an ethical ‘stop’ sign, in a sense. This opened the way to abuse in an atmosphere in which President George Bush and senior officials were demanding better intel and were openly questioning the Geneva Conventions.”

Why do neocons always undermine safeguards against the torture and abuse of prisoners everywhere and uphold the death penalty? What is it in the conservative nature that makes them so eager to harm others in their paranoid seeking to control and dominate everyone around them? Let’s hope that the conservative temperament isn’t the best survival mechanism and that their maniacal genetic makeup will die out.

Many of us think it’s all right to torture someone else until we realize that if our intelligence services can devalue any human life, they can also devalue your life. Once into the business of torture, torture becomes perfectly natural and acceptable. Then comes the day your government decides you might be the enemy and it’s your turn to be tortured for information. Now the rights which defended you are gone because you wanted your enemy to be tortured, and you didn’t foresee that, did you?

How do you explain what the South African intelligence forces did to their own citizens except by a slow loss of compassion for the humanity in each of us? They became like the American poultry workers who smash birds against the wall. By the time it’s your turn to take the water torture, to be smashed against the wall, it’s too late. You should have spoken up to protect the law before your turn to be tortured arrived.


GUARDSMEN WHO REALLY GUARDED

Spokesman Review story in August 8, 2004 paper: I say, “hurrah” for Oregon troopers in Iraq who stopped the beatings of prisoners by Iraqi policemen! Glad for that, but also aware, now, of the third incident which shows that my prediction is accurate, that, soon, ex-Saddam policemen will be beating up the same people under the new government that they beat up under Saddam’s. Everything changes but everything remains the same. I don’t really believe that, but in this one instance, in Bush’s Iraqi mess, it’s true.

Let me slip this in here: if we return Bush to office, we make all Bush’s stupidity America’s stupidity. If we vote him out, we repudiate bushman tactics and show that America has rejoined the human race and is part of the world once again. Not only that, Bush out/ Kerry in will give us the flexibility and excuse to try anything new. Kerry won’t be beholden to Bush’s pride and stubborn resistance to declaring his mistake. Kerry will have a clean slate.


EVERYBODY MUST BE ARMED!

Spokesman story tells us (August 9, 2004) about a Bristow, Oklahoma man who shot himself in the ass when he stuck a 22 pistol in his belt. Why did he stick a 22 pistol in his belt? Paranoia.... He’d heard that somewhere in his community a fugitive was on the loose. He wanted to be able to take a pot shot, we must suppose, at the fugitive if he showed himself in the neighborhood. Now... how he’d be able to recognize a fugitive if he saw him I don’t know, unless he planned to stop every stranger in his neighborhood or just take a shot at any strange auto passing through.

Imagine if we all carried around concealed weapons as many neocons suggest. Multiply this one accident by thousands a week. How long do you suppose before accidental gun deaths superseded auto accidents in the number of deaths reported? Can you imagine the day in, day out carnage of accidental shootings, not to mention the homicides caused by angry men pulling guns on one another.

Besides, the everyday carrying of guns has been tried once in American history, back in the days of the wild West. The bushman's favorite historical period. The only way that carnage was halted and the West tamed was when sheriffs forced anybody entering their towns to turn in their guns while they were in town. Eventually, these temporary confiscations of guns mutated into laws about carrying weapons. These laws have been around for a long time, and nobody seemed to be bothered too much about them until the N.R.A. made a bunch of paranoid males even more paranoid. The danger with paranoids is that they are the kind who shoot first and ask questions later.

Bush’s failure to stop the purchase of automatic weapons in America shows either that he’s secretly in sympathy with the terrorists who are shooting up Iraq and thinks that Americans need also to be armed with automatic weapons and ready to shoot up Americans he doesn’t agree with or that he’s just plain stupid. The choice is yours, dear reader.
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"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." —mathematician, atheist, social activist, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)