[Peace-discuss] Torture and the Fourth of July

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I am sadly going to miss the July 4 celebrations here in town -- notably
the AWARE float -- so (goaded a bit by a recent comment from Chuck) I'm
posting a note on the subject I've sent to the local enforcer of the
modern equivalent of the Stamp Act, the editor of the News-Gazette.  A
safe and sane Fourth for the US is obviously wildly unlikely.  --CGE]


Growing up in Cold War America, I was taught that, whatever mistakes our
country might make, what finally set the US apart from the countries that
were our enemies was that, in those countries, people could be arrested
without notice, held in prison without trial, tortured and killed under
"interrogation" -- and that all those things were approved by the highest
officials of those lands.  Such things, we were told, could not happen in
the United States of America, and that made us different.

Now, bitterly, we are coming to learn that that wasn't true.  If we
Americans had known what was being done in our name by our military and
that of our hireling, Israel, in the territories that they illegally
occupy, most of us would have been appalled.  We have not only killed tens
of thousands of people -- we don't even count them -- but have instituted
torture regimes at the direction of the highest officers of our
government.

As we celebrate our Independence Day this July 4, it's our patriotic duty
to turn our government away from its crimes (as some Englishmen tried to
turn their government away from the crimes Jefferson listed in the
Declaration of Independence), to work to frustrate its real war aim of
establishing permanent military control of a country with vast energy
resources (and thus controlling the world-wide economy), and to force it
to punish -- with impeachment and jail -- those responsible for these
illegal wars and the torture regime that has accompanied them.

	***