Some Kind of 'Manly'
By Molly Ivins

I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning. Maybe I should try to get a grip -- after all, it's just this one administration that I had more cause than most to realize was full of inadequate people going in. And even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Cheney. And after all, we were badly frightened by 9-11, which was a horrible event. "Only" nine senators voted against the prohibition of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control the United States." Nine out of 100. Should we be proud? Should we cry?

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The Power of Narrative, and the Myth that Justifies the Horrors

In the middle of last night, motivated primarily by my growing revulsion as I comprehended the magnitude of the horror revealed in this NYT op-ed piece, I wrote this essay: Monsters with Borrowed Souls: The Horror Magnifies. Several of the issues that I identified deserve lengthier consideration. Here I will discuss one of them, because it is particularly well-suited to an explanation of the title and theme I chose for this new blog. The NYT article traces the source of the torture methods now adopted by the U.S. military. The nature of that source is more than sufficiently horrifying: it turns out that these particular barbaric techniques were practiced and perfected (if such a word can be employed in this context) by communists who were once our enemies. The purpose of the torture is equally sickening. As the authors put it: "For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession." As I pointed out, this means that the rationalization of using torture to procure useful intelligence and thus to save lives is only that: a rationalization, and a blatant lie. These methods have never been used, and are not used today, to obtain the truth: "truth was beside the point." The point was, and is, to destroy the prisoner's will -- to make him a literally mindless automaton who will do exactly as he is told. This is now the purpose adopted by our own military. This alone is sufficient to make any person who remains remotely civilized recoil in disgust at the degree of inhumanity involved. Make no mistake: this is sadism for its own sake, with no further aim or purpose. In the future, I'll write in some detail about the psychological sources of this kind of impulse, and I will also repost earlier essays of mine which address this question. As I say, all of this is horrifying enough -- but one element that underlies this is even worse with regard to the object and nature of the target of destruction. It is monstrous to deliberately destroy even one human being -- but it is even more monstrous to destroy the concept of morality itself, and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, between the truth and a vicious lie.

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