Medieval America When did torture become American policy? BY J.F. CRONIN Good news! The body count from Iraq and Afghanistan indicates we're winning. Torture deaths, us, 26, beheadings, them, 24. The scary thing is, if 26 torture deaths are confirmed in a program that is under the highest levels of classification, there are probably a lot more. Think about that. We're torturing people to death or standing by while foreigners, at our behest, do. In this war to bring our values to the world, we have descended on the scale of human development, and the moral rhetoric in the face of murder contradicts our national ethos. Not even the apologists for this conflict are saying that our heinous actions serve the greater good. To do so would be to condone barbarism, a term so freely used to describe those conducting the beheadings, and expose American moral corruption. I can remember reports from Vietnam where American prisoners were tortured, stirring a wave of moral indignation in this country. We thought that we were a people that would never stoop to such barbaric behavior. Don't look now, but we have stooped and no one seems to care. You can delude yourself into thinking it has all been done by rogue enlisted personnel, or a few people acting independently, but the facts don't substantiate that theory. Military prisoners (a Defense Department responsibility) are handed over to the CIA and/or the FBI and whisked away into a friendly country (it is a State Department responsibility to gain access clearances to foreign nations) that uses torture with our approval. We provide the questions we want answered, then try to distance ourselves from the responsibility. In Washington, activity involving more than one agency is coordinated either by a lead agency or a higher authority. There is only one higher authority in this country, and it ain't Sergeant Joe Blow from the East Bejip National Guard. When did torture become American policy? The timing coincides with the rush to do away with Geneva Convention provisions. Without those restrictions, rationalized as non-applicable by the Justice Department in our war on terror, we wrote ourselves a blank check to proceed as we wished in handling POWs and people in vague combatant statuses. Without restrictions, zealotry has replaced morality as the governor of human actions. The American interrogators involved in killing people aren't from the dregs of our society. The military and other agencies pick their interrogators from the more intellectual among their candidates. What does this say about us as a people, when the most intelligent among us willingly commit horrific crimes against other humans with impunity? More concerned with doing their job than with doing right, interrogators have discarded ethical values to wartime expediency. As a nation, our presumed religiosity and moral superiority is being exposed. We lied our way into war, and under the rubric of national security we are condoning acts in contravention to our stated philosophical principles and redefining our character. Unfortunately, without moral limitations, people follow the path the government lays out for them, and in this instance, the administration has willfully discarded the values placed on human life developed through centuries of civilization. Beheading people as our enemies do is barbaric, but is torturing a person to death more humane? Certainly neither practice can be justified by a nation that considers itself the most advanced in world history. We are on a slippery slope. We have a Congress that calls special sessions to save a person in a vegetative state, or to save baseball, but only sits by while people are tortured at the hands of Americans. Where is the outcry of the moralists who become aroused over the sanctity of life and the decline of American culture? Is their outrage reserved for Christian Americans? None of those who say they revere life and are worried about the decline of the American culture has raised a voice in regard to documented torture and death of other peoples. If that isn't a decline in American culture, even worse, if that isn't a regression in human development, what is? John F. Cronin of Depoe Bay is a retired military officer and author of Signs Hanging on the Wire, a novel about Vietnam inspired by his experiences in the war.     Weaning Ourselves Anyone dare to get real about oil? Yuri Samer OK, It's May already. Thankfully, spring allows a bit of spiritual rejuvenation watching dead grass-colored fur-ball goslings toddle between adult birds near the Delta Ponds. Until I realize that this expatriate colony of wintering geese are the lucky escapees of the next industrial invasion — the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Set aside by that radical Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, ANWR is literally a maternity ward for more than 200 animal and 125 bird species. It is the most significant on-shore denning habitat for polar bears, already given a mere 50 years to survive by a University of Washington study and but a small portion of the Great Boreal System that rings the northern portion of our world. That front of the industrial war does not present an upbeat picture at this point. Last year the British ornithological study gave hundreds of European songbird species 75 to 100 years before being on the eternal brink. That's a lot of dead canaries on the floor of the mine shaft . So, given that we do seem to be painting ourselves (or our great-grandchildren) into a corner of a gas chamber, what are we actually doing to change the outcome? Grabbing a slice of pizza on a recent Sunday evening at Theo's/Cozmic Pizza I heard lots of a retrofitted anti-Vietnam music. Cheers and hurrahs for a "new paradigm," advocacy for resisting a new military draft, oblivious to the Manifest Denial of sipping espressos while soothing our sensibilities with strident tunes in whatever motor vehicle one thinks is more excusable than others (I didn't see a single bicycle parked outside). So much effort spent to compartmentalize our opposing thumb enslaved egos from being disturbed by the low price-point fossil fuel chemistry embalmed Cool-Max Go Duckee truly Dead Air bits of a mysteriously marvelous wonder we call a "planet" piling up about us. Instead we preoccupy ourselves with any variant of vividly pixilated plasma megahertz of out-of-sight, out-of-mind programming we prefer — which I suspect is actually the problem with our tasteless answer to maintaining security in the international juggle of greed and power just as we pass the peak of oil production. The increasing difficulty of maintaining the veil of delusion is a tad foreboding. We can't be bothered with 10,000 human refugees living for years in abandoned train cars while we suppress warlords along the great Caspian Eur-Asian pipeline project. So why should bird, bear and caribou babies who have no such option even get a wince? Well, tornadoes touching down in suburban San Francisco ought to alert us to cause and effect. Likewise, the unprecedented numbers of children now packing inhalers to school due to an asthma epidemic. Shall we personally put into effect a daily effort to turn things around before the door is shut on the whole planet? As Ted Koppel observed on "Nightline": "If you thought getting Americans to give up their guns was difficult, wait until you try to get them out of their cars." Our very sexual identities have been indoctrinated by mass media auto erotic-sizing propaganda since age 2, so it's not surprising that we are addicted to our jalopies, or, as James Kunstler points out in his new book, The Long Emergency, we opened the world's largest police station in Iraq to keep a handle on the oil-endowed neighborhood. All our frivolous addictions (but most blatantly our cars) cost more dollars, more atmospheric destruction, more destruction of this fragile terrarium we live in, and endless long-term military commitments. Just maybe it's time we start weaning ourselves, "Do the right thing," and all that. Dare to live as many days and hours as we can without the grossest of our indulgent addictions. Because even if we want to commit suicide as a species or culture, we have no moral right to take out hundreds of other species with us. "Let's go further," was the assertion Ken Kesey made at a roundtable discussion on "The Third World War for the Planet" (his term) 30 years ago. Perhaps in 2005 we can get past the nostalgia of burning draft cards and snuff out our addiction to burning fossil fuels 24/7? Can we positively challenge each other to forego the things for perhaps two or three days per week? Dare we even try one day per week for starters? We all know it's real; each of us is one leaky spigot in the torrent of life being lost. Imagine other believers, assorted heathens and skeptics heeding the mounting evidence of mass extinctions. We do not have to continue buying into the industrial invasions that "refine" the biological world into a patchwork of suburban toy boxes, rural junkyards, stadium fairs and factory tailings, setting into motion another generation's likelihood of joining the Disappeared much, much sooner consequent to our cooperating with the Shoah of so many species. Yuri Samer is a local social studies teacher, chess tutor and coach who can be reached at chspks@mindspring.com
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