US Impunity is Wrong

I find I cannot let this torture horror go. On yesterday's Democracy Now program, Amy Goodman interviewed Alfred McCoy about Obama's not addressing the issue of torture beyond the release of the torture memos. McCoy, a history professor from the University of Wisconsin, cited instances of past torture by the CIA where a. the public found out, b. Congress got in a frazzle, c. no one was prosecuted, d. all was forgotten, and a-redux, the whole cycle was repeated. His 2006 book documents this sordid past.

The program featured a video of Condaleezza Rice dancing around the torture issue with some Stanford students, saying essentially the barbarians at the gate called for desperate measures after 9-11. McCoy points out how the South American dictators used the same arguments to torture their own people. I'm not sure how many Americans were tortured by Bush. Certainly, he terrorized US citizens to the extent that they would not speak out in spite of the "big sister" warnings in the Metro-"See it; say it." I felt I was in China during the Cultural Revolution getting my parents imprisoned as imperialistic intellectuals for bad words against the state. No jokes at the airport I find particularly oppressive...maybe getting arrested for bad puns or accordion jokes is OK, but turning air travelers into humorless automatons is beyond my pale.

What struck me most was McCoy's using the word impunity. It means "exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm," according to my hardback big, fat American Heritage Dictionary. ( I tend to get impunity mixed up with impugn, so I have thought that impunity was the same as impugning, rather than nearly its opposite.)

I found an internet site called Impunidad. The first line states,"Impunity. Perhaps no word defines the experiences of Latin America as well as this one," and goes on to say how the guilty are free and often at their old posts where they can do it (torture, kill) again. They state, "Impunity without doubt is one of the gravest problems affecting the continent, and one that needs to be urgently addressed."

I would maintain that the continent includes the land mass to the north and that we need to urgently address this grave problem. Let's start with Bush and Cheney and move to all the signers and signifiers of the torture memos and the apologists like Rice. Let's prosecute them and punish them for their crimes against humanity and especially for their crimes against the USA. Let us return to the rule of law.