On a cross

I have mentioned the murder of Manadel al-Jamadi before now. His case is discussed in various places in the tinfoil hat quarter (which is increasingly looking like the home of reason, compared with the almost unerringly wrongfooted traditional media.

His story has now found its way fully into the mainstream, and it poses many questions, whose answers should cause us to look deeply into who we are and what we're doing in the world.

The most shocking thing about al-Jamadi's murder is not that he was crucified by a CIA operative, which I think we all know now is par for the course -- if you don't know that America is torturing and having tortured Muslims on a grand scale, you're not paying any attention at all, and quite possibly cannot or do not read, nor that the file on his case is sitting in a drawer with no action likely ever to be taken against the man who murdered him (just one more unpunished crime in America's long list through the past century of its engagement with the world, freeing people from "tyranny" and their lives), but that it ws probably not even illegal. America seems to have created a legal climate in which its operatives are entirely unrestrained by law, even if they torture people to death.

Bush threatens to veto any bill that carries the McCain amendment, reasserting the US commitment to not using torture. Threatens to veto a promise not to torture!

Is that who we are? Not the people who wouldn't stoop to torture but the people who refuse to give it up? Addicts of torture? Convinced that because in some ways it works as it promises to do (although it has deep negative effects that cannot be ignored as a counterweight to any beneficial outcomes) we must keep it as a tool in our war against the third w... sorry, terror?

Well, if we are, why pretend? Why pretend that we abhor the despots who use it? Why pretend that we are upset by Halabja? Why pretend that we care about Uday's bastinadoing footballers? Why not just admit that we are just like them?

There is no good or evil in this world, no infection that some have and some avoid. Only us. Only us and what we choose to be and do.

posted by Dr Zen @ 2:29 pm