The Silence of the Liberals

We’ve been traveling here and there this past week, and I’ve had a chance to listen to talk radio – the liberal side of the story. It’s basically Ed Schultz’s nationally syndicated show, and the comedienne Stephanie Miller, who broadcasts out of Los Angeles. At least Miller makes no claim to unusual insight. Schultz is a cruel joke – a Limbaugh-like blowhard.

They’ve talked a lot about torture. I don’t think they get it at all. Miller especially thinks that it’s important to know that torture does not result in good information. The presumption is that the people doing it are stupid or inept.

I doubt it.

As a creature of the left, I’ve been aware of torture by U.S. agencies for years – there’s nothing new going on here. Furthermore, the techniques are sophisticated and have been refined over the years. When I saw hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners standing on blocks I knew what was going on – the procedure induces psychosis. It was not done for fun or because Lindie England was being sadistic. Try it on your kids some time.

Poor Lindie had to fry – that is a standard cover-up procedure – to offer up someone down in the ranks to get the press and public to move on. This was no different than the 1960’s when Lt. William Calley was blamed for the My Lai massacre. Torture and murder of civilians was rampant in Vietnam, and My Lai, like Abu Ghraib, exposed a small bit of it. The military instantly beats a strategic retreat, offers up a villian, and closes the door. (One man who played an important part in the My Lai cover-up: Colin Powell.)

Anyway, liberals are, as usual, clueless. Torture serves a useful purpose – it breaks people’s will to resist. Iraq was to be permanently occupied, but there was a strong resistance movement in the population. The U.S. military methodically found and broke insurgents. They weren’t after information, per se. Unless young men were willing to give up their friends and comrades, they didn’t know much. It was never about “actionable intelligence”. It was directed at a larger goal. U.S. soldiers, then and right now, routinely went on Gestapo-like night raids, breaking down doors, lining families up against the wall, making mothers and children watch as fathers and young men were taken away. They were abducted and tortured. No doubt many were murdered. When those who survived returned to society, they spread their tales, and the result was just what the U.S. wanted – terror. The object of the so-called War on Terror was to create terror. It’s kind of funny, really. Orwell would admire it, no doubt.

That’s the object of torture. It is intended to terrorize people. It’s a standard device in the counterinsurgency tool box. Go back to Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Reagan Wars in Central America, and you will find the U.S. torturing people in the same manner they did in Iraq. The U.S. military even trained torturers at the old School of the Americas, since renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”.

It’s going on, right now, as we speak.

What is Obama going to do about it? Nothing. He’s no reformer – he’s magnificently weak. He’s not going to change the way we’ve done business since the end of World War II. He’s going to do what Clinton did with Iran Contra – turn his back and walk away.

This is taken from an interview with Mark Benjamin, national correspondent for Salon.com. He and others have been investigating Mitchell Jessen & Associates, a Spokane company that has been working on torture and terror techniques for the government. He was asked if Obama was going to do anything about the Bush Administration’s terror activities:

No, I don’t think we’re going to see any arrests. And I think that the significance of what the Obama administration has done over the last few days or announced over the last few days has been largely missed, which is, if you look at the President’s statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff, and Eric Holder, the Attorney General, if you put those together, you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal even though they knew that it frankly wasn’t, none of those people will ever face charges. The Attorney General has announced that not only that, the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys.

And not only that, they have given this blanket immunity, if you will, in return for nothing. … Obama yesterday … was at the CIA and called these things “mistakes,” even though they were very carefully designed, and hasn’t demanded anything in return for this immunity. … it’s not like the Obama administration said, “Hey, let’s take a close look at this, and let’s have some people come forward and testify, and let’s take a close look at this program and see if the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney are really true, that we really did get some good information out of this program, it really was effective.” The Obama administration has demanded nothing and has announced … effectively that the story is over and nobody will be held to account ever.

Richard Nixon quietly let Lt. Calley go. Someday in the not-too-distant future, Lindie England will walk among us again, though under strict orders never to talk. What’s interesting to watch now is the Silence of the Liberals. Stephanie Miller was so clueless that she actually said that Obama is playing chess against checker players. She thinks he’s secretly planning to hang ’em high. Good grief.