When Torture Takes a Backseat

With the fifth anniversary of 9/11 quickly approaching and the news that ABC/Disney will be airing a historically innacurate docudrama about the lead up to that horrid day, activists from the grassroots to the highest levels of the former Democratic government have staunchly expressed their public outrage - demanding that the truth be presented to the American people.

I'd like to believe that perhaps it's a matter of bad timing or having the inability to walk and chew gum at the same time that the fact that, during this same week, when the President of the United States stood before his citizens and the world admitting to the existence of secret CIA prisons and the use of alternative methods of interrogation (torture) that a similar amount of public energy was not expressed about these stark, humiliating, and dangerous facts. That's what I'd like to believe, but I know that's not the truth.

What does it say about a country's citizens when they collectively choose not to rise up and demand once and for all that the brutality and lawlessness of their government come to an abrupt end?

This is not a partisan issue. That type of behaviour ought never be protected and anyone who would put their party before their country in the face of such blatant abuses simply doesn't understand what their responsibility as a citizen entails.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Ben Franklin

How many times have we seen that quote since the reign of George W Bush began as he's been aided and abetted by his Republican congress to continually break the laws of the land, relying on terror and fearmongering to justify America's descent from a country of freedoms to a country whose government has such a tight grip on its people that individual privacy has virtually been wiped out? A country in which an undercurrent of defeatism so rules the day that its citizens are only able to muster a small cry of horror against the human rights abuses perpetrated by its government. A country in which the Democrats, who also had control over the CIA's actions for decades as well without rooting out torture, are seen as the saviours of America's reputation. A country whose governmental system is so corrupted by powermongers and greed that the citizenry feels overwhelmingly powerless.

When a country's president admits the most horrendous abuses and the rest of the government and its public can't even muster the energy rallied to protest over historical innacuracies in a television film to protest those actions, what's a foreigner like me to conclude? If I didn't regard those who've been tortured as citizens of the world or if my fellow countrymen hadn't been subjected to that type of cruelty, as in the cases of Maher Arar and Omar Khadr, maybe I could just stop caring too. Maybe I could just focus on ABC and Disney and their fakery in The Path to 9/11. Maybe I could just stop writing about Americans and their diseased government. Maybe I could just give up and watch the deserved fall of the American empire into the abyss of hell. Maybe I could just give up as well because that's certainly the way I feel some days - that resistance is futile and that I've lost my faith in my neighbours to the south to actually change what's happened to their country.

It's contrary to my nature, however, to not scream in opposition to torture; to not fight in the midst of lawlessness; to not sit back and take it when peoples' rights are infringed; to not demand justice for the victims of this inhumanity. So, I'm held hostage by the fact that I do care; that I won't live in a world where an American president can so cavalierly endorse destroying human beings in his custody; that I won't fear the powers of secret torturers like the CIA and that I won't stand for the complicity of Americans who don't give a damn about people being abused in their name while they look away and pretend nothing's happening. No.

Anyone who supports the use of torture is as guilty as those who actually inflict the pain. And a country's citizenry that can't even manage to rally those who oppose such practices to the level they've managed to over a fake television recounting of 9/11 will not be enabled by this foreigner. Not anymore. Your salvation isn't to be found in the Democrats - many of whom have been complicit in endorsing these methods. It's to be found in a major overhaul of your government system. And, if there's no energy left in America to take that on, then poke away at docudramas and misleading campaign commercials and Joe Lieberman. Just know that the rest of the world is watching and we're not willing to take it anymore.