Fun Bits About American Torture

In many ways, the U.S. is now just as inhumane
and brutal as any Third World regime. Oh well?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 16, 2005

"We do not torture." Remember it, write it in red crayon on the bathroom wall, tattoo it onto your acid tongue because those very words rang throughout the land like a bleak bell, like a low scream in the night, like a cheese grater rubbing against the teeth of common sense when Dubya mumbled them during a speech not long ago, and it was, at once, hilarious and nauseating and it took all the self-control in the world for everyone in the room not to burst out in disgusted laughter and throw their chairs at his duplicitous little head.

Oh my God, yes, yes we do torture, America that is, and we do it a lot, and we do it in ways that would make you sick to hear about, and we're doing it right now, all over the world, the CIA and the U.S. military, perhaps more often and more brutally than at any time in recent history and we use the exact same kind of techniques and excuses for it our numb-minded president cited as reasons we should declare war and oust the dictator of a defenseless pip-squeak nation that happened to be sitting on our oil.

This is something we must know, acknowledge, take to heart and not simply file away as some sort of murky, disquieting unknowable that's best left to scummy lords of the government underworld. We must not don the blinders and think America is always, without fail, the land of the perky and the free and the benevolent. Horrific torture is very much a part of who we are, right now. Deny it at your peril. Accept it at your deep discontent.

Torture is in. Torture is the tittering buzzword of the Bush administration, bandied about like secret candy, like a hot whisper from Dick Cheney's gnarled tongue into Rumsfeld's pointed ear and then dumped deep into Dubya's Big Vat o' Denial.

More Morford

That's just for show. He really loves to torture people... like Carla Faye Tucker.

"It all depends on what your definition of torture is." - Stilletto Heels (Aka Condi)

"Because here's the sad kicker: Torture works. It gets results."

Torture doesn't work. Period. Unless the "results" you want are simply to have someone else parrot what you want them to say. Hell of a way to make a ventriloquist's dummy out of a human being.

Bushco has traded away our humanity for an empty sack of lies

Still, it's a fine piece.

We should all write and thank him:

mmorford@sfgate.com

Torture is a topic I am upset about, and have cranked out a few political cartoons about it.