Not to pretend that either Left or Right, Republican or Democrat actually holds the morel high ground as an intrinsic quality. Far from it. But we keep hearing over and over again on the news that the pressure to investigate torture is coming from the Left. As if the shit-storm we’re seeing right now could possibly be generated by the relatively small group of independents on the Left.
We know that the media loves to drive the Right-Left Bloodsport story, but the idea that a bunch of cigarette-smoking, absinthe-drinking, goatee-wearing bongo-playing poet intellectuals have driven the story of Americans torturing perceived enemies into the tops of all the headlines is simply absurd. This story is being driven by a genuine outrage across a large section of the American public over – call me over sensitive – genuinely outrageous stuff.
And for fuck’s sake, people, does it not matter to anyone in the MSM that crimes appear to have been committed? Politics be damned. Optics be damned. Crimes committed in a nation of laws need to be prosecuted, even if you think they were justified; justification is a question for opinion makers, immaterial to the proper prosecution of laws.
Even more frustrating about the conversation – and even more of a measure of the psychosis that the War on Terror has thrown a large portion of our nation’s power structure, as reflected by the media that bathes itself in that power – is the idea that, because there’s a war going on, we cannot stop to examine our mistakes. This is simply not the case and there is simply no precedent for that type of heedlessness in our history. Plenty of prosecutions have happened in war time, from the Revolutionary War right up to the present day.
I would like someone in the media to patiently explain to my obviously ignorant ass what, precisely, about the United States of America continuing to prosecute it’s laws would embolden the enemy? What about the United States of American proving that it’s laws can withstand it’s institutions and it’s institutions can withstand it’s laws makes us weak?
We derive our strength from our laws. Crimes appear to have been committed. A proper investigation, even if no prosecutions or convictions proceed from it, is the only strategic move.
