Daily Blague

At Biscuit Report, Amy has posted an eloquent entry that explodes a lot of the nonsense inherent in gabble about "the balance between liberty and safety."

But why should we even have to debate if we are willing to lose our souls for the not-at-all-certain possibility of adding another drop of illusory security into the infinite bucket of impermanence and death? All we have is this moment, our way of life right now. Right now, we are torturers. We have traded our liberty and our honor, in this moment, for the wish that someday, some distant time in the future, we will be safe. It's one thing to sell your soul for some immediate benefit -- we've sold our souls for a hypothetical and utopian future, for the day the War On Terror ends, and Democracy and Freedom are everywhere.

The frontier of torture may be difficult to discern, but there is no doubt that American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently acting under orders or pursuant to guidelines, have sailed across it numerous times and plunged deep into torture's territory. Hoods, electric shocks, sexual humiliations, and peroneal strikes are all unmistakably acts of torture. Living conditions at Guantánamo Bay are inhumane. Even assuming that the mass of detainees have done something to merit incarceration, acts and conditions that impinge upon their physical dignity - "cruel and unusual punishments," in the words of the Eighth Amendment to our Constitution - are completely unjustifiable. To wink at them is to risk, as Amy puts it, one's soul.

But what are you waiting for? Go read Amy!