The U.S. wins the right to abduct innocent people with impunity

Originally posted on June 15th 2010

We used to stand against countries that did this sort of thing. Our Democratic and Republican leaders are morally bankrupt.

To which a friend responded: Are you sure about that? Or were they always morally bankrupt and now they are morally bankrupt and stupid so they don’t know how to cover these things up anymore.

My response to that question: That’s a good point. I guess when the Soviet Union was around, there was a great deal of political capital to be made by opposing all they and totalitarianism stood for, though I suspect more sincerely as the USSR was a legitimate threat. So it’s possible they were morally bankrupt then but with good and evil so explicitly defined there was no way to dance around the edges.

I still tend towards morally bankrupt, because not only are they not trying to cover this up, but are in fact putting forth the case that they had legitimate reasons for abducting a completely innocent man and shipping him off for 10 months of torture. The whole point of the US outlawing torture was to prevent exactly this sort of thing when the inevitable screw up happened and an innocent person was detained. Now we’ve abandoned that for what every study proves is worthless information.

So we support an evil system that we know produces no legitimate information, prop up the governments of those countries like Syria that ensure the crimes are not committed on US soil, reap the results of the oppression those countries use to keep their own citizens in line, and ultimately try to pass it all off as necessary for protecting the liberty of the citizens of the United States. So yes, at the point at which my liberty is purchased through the unwarranted abduction and torture of an innocent man, who’s greatest crime was not being lucky enough in the geographic local of his birth, I say the price of that “liberty” – if it can exist at all under the thumb of a government willing to commit and defend these crimes – has reached a point where it has morally bankrupted us and for which we have no tangible asset to display in return for having sold out.