This week we finally made it to a local theater to see The Bourne Ultimatum, and the action did not disappoint. Interestingly, there was scattered applause throughout the theater several times during the movie. People were obviously cheering Matt Damon's Jason Bourne character in his fight with ultra-secret elements in the CIA and the unethical, murderous intent of David Straithairn's character, Deputy Director of the CIA, Noah Vosen. There were definite parallels to political events today. When Joan Allen's character, Pamela Landy, rejects Vosen's disregard of the "red tape" that is really oversight established to prevent unethical behavior of our governing and intelligence-gathering agencies, she tells Bourne, "This isn't us."
I wanted to clap, too.
When I viewed those first images coming out of Abu Ghraib, I, too, thought, "My God, this can't be us."
When I read of how prisoners were being tortured at Guantanamo and refused legal aid, I couldn't believe this was us; we were doing the torturing, and American psychologists were aiding in that torture. I was outraged and could hardly believe that we were denying Jose Padilla, an American citizen, access to a lawyer. "This can't be us," I wanted to insist. "This isn't us."
Well, here isn't us again: at Afghanistan's Policharki prison, a prison that was "a notorious torture center during. . . Soviet domination" of that country. Good God, what is wrong with our elected officials and military leaders? Why do they keep stashing people in prisons notorious for horrible torture perpetrated by previous oppressive regimes? And how do we justify torturing prisoners to death, such as what happened at Bagram, the U.S. Air Force base in Afghanistan?
Why aren't more Americans screaming, "This isn't us!?"
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