Muse.On-The.Net

Today CIA director Michael Hayden admitted “waterboarding” interrogation had been used on three high-profile al-Qaeda detainees.  Waterboarding simulates drowning and, in the minds of the sane, is a form of torture.

Is torture ever justified?  A difficult question I will not debate here.  What I will discuss is the nature of honesty and the role of just people, particularly our leadership and the news media, in the context of abuse of power.

The US government is not alone in being, at times, corrupt, wrong, and dishonest.  However, as a veracious proponent of democratic principles - including freedom of speech - and moral righteousness,  the US does stand as an example of what should be.  Therefore, when it fails to act appropriately, all the more reason to react appropriately and demand better.  Yet, throughout the Bush administration, this has rarely been the case.

The US says it does not torture people.  When word that Canada had placed the US on a list of countries that commit torture the US indignantly complained and forced a retraction from Canada.  After all, the US defines torture quite specifically to not include their methods.  That Canada retracted is more the shame on Canada.  The the US news media will not jump on Hayden’s admission, that the US judicial system shall not stand up and prevent this travesty is more a loss of faith for all the world, for a beacon of freedom, justice, and hope has been dimmed beyond our ability to see through the gloom of despair and the fog of apathy.  How has this come to be?

Nixon was derailed by Watergate yet, in the end, was his crime worse than this?  People have become jaded into inaction.  Rather than rally the masses, the media deals in disinformation when it bothers to report at all.  The media is quite willing to publish the lies of government without repudiation.

The world needs leaders willing to rise above political bargaining, back-room deals, and intimidation to do what is right, not what may be expedient.  The world needs media willing to be a watch-dog willing to focus attention when things go wrong and to report the truth regardless of the repercussions.  Finally, the world needs a citizenry willing to rise above apathy and demand better at every opportunity.  Only then will we build a society that we can be proud to live in.