In her New Yorker article, Outsourcing Torture, Jane Mayer has thrown a window open to ‘the secret history of American’s “extraordinary rendition” program’ in which the United States Government has become a collaborator in an international torture ring.
“Extraordinary rendition” Bob Herbert writes bluntly in the New York Times “is one of the great euphemisms of our time.”
“Extraordinary rendition is the name that’s been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.
Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation – the United States – that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays’ getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?” —from “Torture, American Style” by Bob Herbert, N.Y. Times Op-Ed, Feb 11, 2005
The answer, Mr. Herbert, is called Christinsanity.
Alberto Gonzales used his legal mind to write government briefs dismissing the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners and justifying the use of torture: he has since been rewarded by the President & Congress with a promotion to U. S. Attorney General.
George W. Bush issued a Presidential Executive Order authorizing torture techniques in military interrogations: he has since been rewarded by voters with 4 more years in the White House.
The world’s dominant religion has veered into Christinsanity numerous times over its long history, and torture has often been the result. Now the leaders of the most powerful nation in the history of the world have succumbed to its evil. Those leaders love to talk loudly about their faith, and it is the primary support of the “faithful” that has propelled them into power.
But this is not the life-oriented faith of a Jimmy Carter. It is faith warped. It is Christianity gone bad, like a cancer.
In that same Times editorial, Herbert reminds us that
“Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.”
