Depressing Decades Culminate with the Torture Report — Stephan Richter and Patrick L. Smith Draw the Only Historically Reasonable Conclusion

© 2014 Peter Free

 

18 December 2014

 

 

After decades of the United States acting badly — as assessed against our self-proclaimed moral standards . . .

 

Genuine American patriots — meaning those who think that the United States really should be better than other nations — should be angry about the details released in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s torture report.   Predictably, they are not.

 

Fox News’ Andrea Tantaros’ — “We’re awesome” — eruption inadvertently synopsized the shallowness of insight that most of us demonstrate, when looking at ourselves.

 

 

I am not picking on Ms. Tantaros

 

Hers was an honest and mildly reasoned reaction to the politics underlying Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein’s release of the torture report, just a few weeks before control of the Senate returns to Republicans. And Ms. Tantaros’ thinking almost certainly parallels the unspoken feelings of much of the public.

 

She argued that (i) the United States no longer tortures people and (ii) we should stop making an issue of it:

 

 

I don’t think they need to give me a lot of transparency at the CIA.

 

The Bush Administration did what the public wanted. That was to do whatever it takes to keep us safe.

 

The United States of America is awesome. We are awesome.

 

This [Obama] Administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.

 

© 2014 YouPolitics News, America Tortures Because “We’re Awesome' - Fox's Andrea Tantaros Loses It Over Senate Torture Report, YouTube (09 December 2014) (Tantaros’ segment begins at 03:00 minutes into the video clip)

 

On a superficial level, we cannot quarrel with her reasoning.

 

On a more insightful one, we should.

 

 

Maybe not so awesome, after all

 

Andrew Bacevich, William Rivers Pitt, Stephan Richter, Patrick L. Smith and I all share the same perspective. There is concealed rot in America’s pretended soul.

 

Release of the torture report was simply another way of camouflaging our love affair with doing oligarchic, imperialistic and quasi-totalitarian business as usual.

 

 

German-born Stephan Richter put the fundamental issue more bluntly than Bacevich and Pitt did

 

He wrote that:

 

 

Men like Dick Cheney, the former Vice President, or John E. McLaughlin, the former CIA Acting Director, and Max Boot at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, are very, very skilled in making the American people feel very afraid.

 

That’s not too hard actually – Americans are quite easily scared.

 

The attention span of the country’s public at large, if it is even tuned into the issue at all, is very short.

 

Rest assured that by the time the next police killing or another high school shooting roll around, the current “hot” debate on the CIA’s torture practices will be wiped off the agenda.

 

In the end, all of this raises the question of the seriousness – even veracity – of the entire American enterprise.

 

Not only did real reform not follow on the Snowden revelations. It also did not happen following the U.S.- and Lehmann-triggered global financial crisis.

 

[I]t was just this week, as the 113th U.S. Congress is wrapping up its business for good, that Wall Street banks scored another major victory in dulling the very few teeth that had been put in as part of the Dodd-Frank Act.

 

No, as things stand, indications are that America is not a serious country.

 

© 2014 Stephan Richter, No NSA Reform, No CIA Reform, The Globalist (14 December 2014)

 

 

What does not being a “serious country” mean?

 

Not being serious means not comparing actions to professed beliefs. Nationally, it means being morally lazy, actively hypocritical and frequently dangerous to domestic and international humanity.

 

Coincidentally, given Stephan Richter’s German birth and perspective, I am writing this while temporarily stationed in Germany. The majority of the population here, and certainly the government, seem to take World War II, the Third Reich and Holocaust seriously. So seriously that, if you want to see a typical older German become earnestly humble and adamantly reformist — just bring those subjects up. The contrast with the American public’s ethically cavalier views of our disasters from Vietnam on is striking.

 

 

Patrick L. Smith applies our lack of seriousness to the historical mirror’s reflection of us

 

He wrote that:

 

 

The reality in plain sight is that America is not the nation many of us think it is and we are not the people we think we are or claim to be.

 

We have the facts before us:

 

apparent sadists torturing others . . .

often obvious racism endemic in law enforcement . . .

corporations classified under law as people.

 

And we have what those in authority are doing about these facts:

 

nothing,

unless we count creating or worsening them as action.

 

These two crises are what I see  . . . . The one tells us we are not decent and the other we are not a democracy.

 

A nation guilty of torturing its prisoners, shooting minority children, fortifying its oligarchies and surveilling its population . . . has nothing to teach the world about democracy, justice, civil rights or the other values we profess . . . .

 

© 2014 Patrick L. Smith, We are f***ing sadists: We are not decent, and we are not a democracy, Salon (17 December 2014) (reformatted extracts)

 

One cannot realistically argue with Patrick Smith’s summation.

 

 

The moral? — I know what Andrea Tantaros meant about “awesomeness” — but she was inadvertently referring to what we once believed, not to what we actually do

 

Hypocrisy, when convenient, has always been the American way, especially in regard to brutally demonstrated racism.

 

We have noticeably further expanded the scope of American denial to (a) plutocracy’s alleged worth and social control and (b) imperialistic militarism’s slyly pretended good intentions.

 

At our denial’s core is cowardice. We are so easily frightened that just looking at the American persona accurately seems to be beyond our ability and feeble will. We soothe ourselves with pretended glances (like the torture report), then we look away to rail against some other nation’s alleged transgressions.

 

Know thyself is an aphorism almost universally disregarded under the stars and stripes. Genuine American patriots should be upset.

 

If America has abandoned striving after its once claimed ideals, what of comparative national worth is left?