BEING HONEST ABOUT TORTURE
February 6, 2009 by Gordon Duff · 3 Comments
TIME FOR SOME STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT TORTURE
THIS IS NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER
I feel like an idiot, writing to thousands of people when I am talking about something that, perhaps, I should keep my mouth shut about. I just finished watching Burn Notice, so this is a good time for us to talk shop about the spy business.
We have always tortured people. We have always killed people. What kind of country do you think we are? We deal with horribly bad people sometimes, people so bad you would never want to know who they are, people so bad they could never go on trial. They get tortured and fed to the alligators or crocodiles, I forget which, the ones with the pointy noses, or is it the other ones. This is too confusing.
When we had to "interview" people, we could do it secretly and they knew we tortured and killed people SECRETLY. People would be glad to tell us what they knew to avoid being tortured horribly and being murdered. Hell, people would even spill their guts just for the privilege of being murdered in a neat and orderly fashion.
We used to have trained professionals who went after evil people, not innocent citizens or security forces of other countries. They and their families were immune. We lived in a world of order, of consequences, of rules.
Then came the idiots of the Bush amateur hour.
When we started our idiotic "War on Terror," we started announcing to the world that we have the moral duty to torture people. We turned it over to amateurs who filmed it, put it on the internet and then our childish yellow bellied politicians, you know the ones, bragged about it on TV.
Then, so those morons could feel safe about violating every international convention known to man, had their equally moronic lawyers say it was all legal. In reality, they simply admitted to the world that they, themselves, were, not only total fools, but criminals, amateur criminals, incompetent criminals, to boot.
Now we have people, here, people around the world, that want to send Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and the rest of those small time "pretend" tough guys to jail for the criminal acts they admitted to with while running their stupid politician mouths. Idiots like this give brutality a bad name.
You simply can’t pick up innocent people at customs, fly them around the world, at subject them to unimaginable abuses and then let them go. There was a reason that we had secrets. We were bad to bad guys and left good people alone. When we wanted to find out who bad guys were, we spied on them SECRETLY.
Now we spy on everyone publicly, violate laws, admit to it, and may not ever be able to protect ourselves again. Spying may be the only industry in the US with job security.
Once, before there was DHS, the Department of Homeland Security and outfits like the NSA and CIA began hiring fools and children, that we had tough and experienced people who spent their lives keeping America safe, or relatively so, and keeping us credible.
Now that our "security" is handled by boyscouts and girlscouts who think torture is having sex in front of prisoners and putting it all on the internet, anyone "real" that is still around will be too embarassed to admit that they are someone they really shouldn’t be admitting to be, if you get my meaning.
We are giving spies a bad name.
Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.
I am not a guy who is for torture. Christ, I am a left wing Democrat. But I have lived in the world and I know that there evil, ugly and incredibly dangerous people out there. And we have tough guys to deal with them because these evil people hate us and would destroy us in a pair of seconds with even half a chance at success. Spies kill people and yes, spies torture people. I don’t like it. I wish it were not so, but that is what spies do and also elite military units, and in foreign countries, the famous “paramilitaries” that the Associated Press is so fond of interviewing. All countries have tough guys who do this for a living. Unfortunately, if countries did not have these guys, they would not be countries for very long. With all this said, what do we do about torture?
I don’t have an answer. But I would say this. There is beating the hell out of a suspected terrorist to get information, then there is crushing his testicles. There is making a sweep into a poor neighborhood overseas, picking up the mother of a terrorist, bringing her to the local police station and having her call her son on the phone to tell him where she is. And then there is going to her home and killing her. There is rounding up poor, illiterate Muslims in a jihadist school and incarcerating them while you re-educate them as to the realities of life in the Western World, and then there is shooting all three hundred of them in cold blood. There is attempting in some sort of Judeo-Christian manner to deal with Wahabist Islamist haters who want us all dead, and then there is destroying half the Middle East with American high tech weapons. The choice is always ours.
I have no ready answer. There are millions of people out there who would just as soon see America and Americans slip into the ocean and die. That is a fact. Just travel overseas sometime. But that does not mean we have a right to go around killing people because of some ideological bent , some Manifest Destiny fever that we still have and have updated into the 21st Century. People hate us, and some of them have very good and solid reasons to hate us. Let there be no doubt in your mind, we are not Boy Scouts. We have done an awful lot of lousy, evil things in the name of “democracy” and “free trade” and “republican ideals”. I mean republican in the sense of our republic, not in the sense of the Republican Party. But that does not mean I am willing to allow myself to be destroyed by a force equally as ambiguous and equally as wrong as me and mine. I want to survive, whether I am sometimes wrong or not.
And for that, you need spies and special forces and amphibious borne light infantry and an aggressive State Department that never quits. We need to recapture a sense of realistic views of who we are and what we can realistically accomplish in the world. We need to put our Bush Era views of Manifest Destiny behind us. If we keep going down that path, we will destroy ourselves and everyone us along with us.
CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)
As someone who has on odd occasion had to "talk to" people about "issues" I know that what we are doing is idiotic.
Coddling assholes is hardly a good idea but torturing tourists and aid workers, as we have been doing, is criminal.
g
OUHRAH Gunny! Someone needs to wake the hell up! The Spy business has gotten ugly and need to be sent back to the Right people who now what they are doing and how to do it right, without any public interference.
Fine close Guitmo but put the prisoners somewhere else like of the coast on an old aircraft carrier or some secret island.
thefoxchaser