You’ve got a young face
In your scream of agony -
So which ‘Great Nation’ did this to you?
Boxed in, trodden on;
Your captors imagine themselves humane,
Conjure up great delusions to justify their means,
Take comfort in their mother’s-milk Arcadia:
A land of guns,
Obscene wealth,
Plummeting health,
Where the poor get poorer.
You pay the price, then, for their reality-check:
The weakness of the dirt-poor makes the dirt-poor stronger.
When you have nothing, you have nothing to fear;
Ideas become your weapon,
And what greater idea is there than that of God?
So now it’s God against God:
The poor God,
The rich God,
Chosen Few against Chosen Few.
Whose side were you on?
I shiver.
Insanity against insanity,
Warlords and Big Corps,
A dirty war without morality,
The thieves and crooks in high palaces
Slugging it out with the crooks in alleyways -
Selfishness and greed the new terror.
I saw a photo of some seventeen year old being tortured in a shipping container in Afghanistan by US troops imposing George Bush’s new world order.
What have the Iraq and Afghanistan wars come down to? Read about the billions of missing and squandered US dollars, and Halliburton / Cheney etc.and you’ll see that there’s a huge component of general thievery and collusion on the rich side – then read about the various warlords on the poor side. You might well come to the conclusion that selfishness and greed on both sides was the pragmatic force nursing terror.
2009
If – like George, Dick, Donald and Karl – you think that torture works, here are a couple of quotes:
From http://www.washingtonpost.com
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
From http://harpers.org
In Iraq, we lived the “ticking time bomb” scenario every day. Numerous Al Qaeda members that we captured and interrogated were directly involved in coordinating suicide bombing attacks. I remember one distinct case of a Sunni imam who was caught just after having blessed suicide bombers to go on a mission. Had we gotten there just an hour earlier, we could have saved lives. Still, we knew that if we resorted to torture the short term gains would be outweighed by the long term losses. I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantánamo Bay. My team of interrogators knew that we would become Al Qaeda’s best recruiters if we resorted to torture. Torture is counterproductive to keeping America safe and it doesn’t matter if we do it or if we pass it off to another government. The result is the same. And morally, I believe, there is an even stronger argument. Torture is simply incompatible with American principles. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both forbade their troops from torturing prisoners of war. They realized, as the recent bipartisan Senate report echoes, that this is about who we are. We cannot become our enemy in trying to defeat him.
With thanks to http://www.schneier.com
