Institutional Support for Torture Undermines Government's Legitimacy

In case my last post was a little too patriotic for some jaded, worldwise visitors to the blog, I received something upsetting in my inbox today.  It was a description from Amnesty International of the ways the U.S. government tortured many innocent men over the past several years, and sometimes children.

I studied human rights in law school. I felt upset and outraged reading Andrew Sullivan's consistent writing on torture back in 2004-05 (I'm sure he wasn't the first). I have represented asylum-seekers, some of whom had experienced unimaginable misery, in the U.S. asylum system for the past three or four years.

But after all this, I only recently came to understand in a deep, personal way the true destructive, dehumanizing impact of torture. Torture takes a person and erases that person. I don't know that I believe in good and evil, but seeing the effects of torture up close is the closest glimpse of evil that I have ever had. I did not until recently understand what torture "meant" in a moral or practical sense.

Reaching that realization and then remembering that the government to which I send part of my income every year to spend on "national defense" has used some of that money to torture human beings is a disturbing place for anyone to arrive. I had thought before that I was distrustful of my government, I had even felt betrayed as I watched events unfold over the last several years. Now thinking about that government and the national community which gives it its raison d'etre, I feel only deadness.  I don't know how to reconcile that with the inspiration I have felt watching the nascent Dream movement coalesce.

Read about Mohammed Jawad, a teenager we locked up at Guantánamo and beat, tortured, and denied access to the legal system. We told him his family would be killed if he did not confess. After his case went up to the Supreme Court, he was finally released and went home.

It looks like the system worked after all!

Ask President Obama and members of Congress to take action to ensure this doesn't happen again and that those responsible for torturing in the name of the greater good are held accountable.

</call to righteous action>

<meditative diversion>

I've had a song stuck in my head lately: Bad Religion's "Sorrow." Here's a low-key acoustic version with some horrific imagery that you should not show your children and maybe not yourself.

This is how systems work. These are the results of a well-functioning system:

Below the fold, do you take Bad Religion's song "Sorrow" at face value or not?

For years I interpreted it one way, and now I am interpreting it another, which seems to me the mark of a good song (and seeing how BR purists hate it because it got played on a few college radio stations makes me like it even more).

Also, to follow up on the text at the end of the video, nothing happens "because of" extreme poverty.  Extreme poverty happens because of other factors.  Poverty is a symptom, not a cause.  That is why it is not very useful to include poverty in any discussion of root causes of migration, at least as that conversation is currently framed in the rich world.

Bad Religion: Sorrow

Father, can you hear me?
How have I let you down?
I curse the day that I was born,
And all the sorrow in the world...

Let me take you to the herding ground,
Where all good men are trampled down,
Just to settle a bet that could not be won,
Between a prideful father and his son.

Well you guard me now for I cant see,
A reason for this suffering and this long misery.
What if every living soul could be upright and strong?
Well, then I do imagine there will be
Sorrow.
Yeah there will be
Sorrow .
And there will be
Sorrow, no more.

When all soldiers lay their weapons down,
Or when all kings and all queens relinquish their crown,
Or when the only true messiah rescues us from ourselves...
Its easy to imagine there will be
Sorrow.
Yeah there will be
Sorrow .
And there will be
Sorrow, no more.

There will be
Sorrow.
Yeah there will be
Sorrow .
And there will be
Sorrow, no more.