My Tax Dollars at Work
by Rootsie
Imagine that-American tax dollars go to pay for torture.
Like I have said before, we are past the time when ‘but I didn’t know!’ can pass for an excuse. It’s like the people in the town of Oswiecim in Poland saying ‘but we didn’t know!’ as the human ashes from the ovens at Auschwitz rained down on their heads. If this democracy business is not a total sham, it is our business as citizens to ‘know’. What I remember most clearly about 9-11 was my feeling of disgust that the American people really had no clue as to why ‘they’ hated us enough to turn their bodies into bombs and slam them into skyscrapers.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, CIA-trained and American financed torturers ran rampant all the way from Guatemala down to Chile. I remember the story of a Brazilian female activist who was found dumped by the side of the road, horribly beaten and raped, her mouth sewn shut. When the doctors opened up her mouth, they found that dogs’ fangs had been implanted in her bleeding gums. The first thing she said was ‘They will never silence me.’
I remember after the 1973 CIA coup in Chile when the national soccer stadium in Santiago was converted into one huge torture chamber where it is estimated that 20,000 died. I remember School of the Americas’ and West Point-trained Roberto D’Aubisson in El Salvador and his death squads who ‘disappeared’ thousands of Indian peasants-corpses were turning up everywhere, hacked to pieces, balls cut off and stuffed in the mouths, charred and brutalized in every possible way. Corpses too in Guatemala, Mayan males slowly tortured to death in front of their mothers’ eyes, or in village rituals where the SUV with the blacked-out windows rolls into town and the games begin. On and on. Reagan proudly stated in 1984 that there was ‘peace in the world,’ no major conflicts in any country, largely thanks to the United States of course. In this same time period 80,000 people were not simply murdered, but tortured to death in Central America, thanks to a lot of good ole U.S. know-how and money and advisors on the ground. We are talking direct support here, and explicit (if covert) policy, not just wink and look the other way. Terrorizing poor non-white people out of their democratic aspirations has been the practical application of the Monroe Doctrine/Manifest Destiny since the Mexican War in the 1840’s.
The ‘occupation’ of these countries in Latin America took place by proxy, and the torturers were not little fresh-faced West Virginia girls, but the information was easily available to anybody who cared. Few did. Now it may be that our chickens have indeed come home to roost, and we have no choice but to engage the issue of our country’s conduct in the world. The world, after all, has been forced to put up with it all these years, and so at the very least it is just that we should be forced to look at ourselves. We resist self-reflection on this level, of course; our privilege tells us we need answer to no one, not even ourselves.
Anybody with a little basic sense knows that this prison torture scandal is not about ‘a few bad apples.’ Whatever those soldiers did to their prisoners was in the context of what they were expected to do, implicitly or explicitly, and it is business as usual, just another day of the United States’ brute presence in the world.
It’s no good trying to get into the mind of a torturer. Famous psychological studies like the Milgrim Experiment assure us with the good news that we too, with very little provocation, would become torturers under the proper circumstances. Articles are springing up all over to this effect. This is an attempt to deflect essential questions by personalizing them. It is not the moment in history for Americans to sit back and reflect intellectually on the mentality of torturers. It is time to let the stark fact sink in that these photos of dead and sexually brutalized Iraqi males are a fair reflection of an overall American foreign policy, American tactics, American intent.
My money pays for this. I am complicit.
May 7th, 2004 at 1:38 pm
I just heard a Congresswoman giving her impassioned rap: "This is NOT who we are!" Hypocrisy, my dear. This is EXACTLY ‘who we are.’ If we don’t like the picture those ‘appalling’ photos give the world of the United States, we should consider the fact that nobody out there finds any of this particularly surprising. It’s just more of the same. Those pictures are like looking in the mirror. If you don’t like what you see, maybe it is not too late to reclaim your humanity. This is not an ‘image problem.’ It’s a reality problem.
May 12th, 2004 at 8:12 am
If anything positive can come out of the current torture revelations, it’s people like Rootsie coming forward to remind us of how our country has really operated. It’s time the history books in our schools teach our children what has really been going going on all these years. Not just the things mentioned by Rootsie – but the facts concerning illegal human experimentation by the US government using drugs, radiation and disease.