USA tortures people-It is known-It is not treated as a crime-It is normalized-It will happen again.

The United States tortures people. It isn't a matter of rogue agents and rogue government officials, it is systemic. The United States tortures people. One president may order the torturing stopped, but there is nothing to prevent another from ordering it resumed. Those responsible for torturing people are identified but not brought to justice. They are, in fact, given free rein to talk openly about it, to minimize it, to justify it, to continue to lie about it, and to act as if questions or criticism about torturing people is just another partisan political argument. The traditional media, the most powerful mass media, play right along. Some in the mass media all but gloat about it. The United States tortures people. It is known. It is not treated as a crime against humanity. It is normalized. It will happen again.

With their usual impresssive ability to get things exactly backward, leading Republicans decry the release of even the heavily redacted version of a Senate report on what was only a partial investigation of Bush-Cheney era CIA torture. They claim the release will harm national security. Because to these blights on the very concepts of morality and human decency, it's not the crimes that matter, it's that people know about them that matter. Of course, the world already knew about the torture. In this country, the major media may have more important things on which to focus, but to people in the countries from which the tortured once lived, heavily staged "reality" entertainment, or the heavily staged personal lives of pop culture personalities, or the heavily staged patronization by extreme 1 percenters who are famous for being famous somehow is considered less relevant than the fact that people were tortured.

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It's not the release of the torture report that can damage national security, it's that the torture happened in the first place. But the greatest damage comes when the entire system of governance is complicit. The national security of the United States is grievously and dangerously undermined when its government does nothing to prove to the nation itself and to the entire world that the United States does indeed abide by basic standards of law and morality and human decency. The national security of the United States is grievously and dangerously undermined when its government proves that the opposite is true.

The facts are known. The perpetrators walk in freedom, and many live in affluence. And those who have made known what facts about the torture are known themselves receive as much criticism as do those responsible for the torture. The United States tortures people. The existence of the torture never was in question. The question was whether the United States would ever do anything about it. The question was whether the United States government abides by not only its own and international laws, but by basic standards of morality and human decency. The question no longer appears to be a question.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/14/1351217/-The-United-States-tortures-people?detail=hide