Baby Steps To Monsterhood

So, we got yet another release of formerly secret data detailing the perpetration of war crimes under the Bush regime in its Terror Wars. Whereas Bush regime chief defender Dick Cheney, who is apparently so defensive he's even slamming his former boss for being too weak when it came to staying the course into oblivion, had told us the secret stuff would totally make the case for torture working, that's not how it actually reads or plays.

But the thing is, the USA is so bored and really exhausted to its core listening to accusations (and facts concerning) all the war crimes it's been committing, and is likely still committing under its new Terrror Wars chief, Obama, that the last thing it cares a whit about is more stuff about just what a terrorist state is the USA. Americans now take the fact they are from a killing, torturing, terrorizing state in stride. It's just part of what they do, of what an empire has to do, to conduct business in a dangerous, crazy world.

So, no real protests are heard except from the usual crowd of liberal loonies, blathering about "law", like that matters any longer except as a sop to the animal-slaughtering proles when somebody like Michael Vick tortures some dogs or something.

We, after all, realize we do not live in a country with any actual rights and freedoms, but just some crap about that written on old, rapidly fading, sheepskins. Far more important than that junk are the privileges naturally obtained by money and its co-habitant, power. Americans witnessed, and paid very close attention to who got the bailouts, the continued big bonuses, the emergency trillions—and it was the rich, the powerful, the very worthless scum whose scumming created the catastrophe in the first place. That's because they matter, and you don't. At least we're all clear on that now.

And so, getting to our point here, it is not so surprising when we read that, contrary to all the propaganda the Bush regime spewed about how only "renegades" and "bad apples" did really bad stuff during America's reign of terror over poor Islamic peoples, the CIA was clinically engaged with managing torture right from the start and right to the deadly finishes.

Why clinically? Oh, you know, like you can't just waterboard people, like a bunch of amateur thugs on a Mexican mafia holiday. Fuck that. No, in the CIA's version of torture, clearly copied in great detail from the records of the Spanish Inquisition, they jotted down every single nuance of suffering and feedback imposed upon and extracted from its victims. And that's so, when it comes time to expand the torture regime from HVD's to CTB's (citizens thinking badly), the CIA and its death panels will be ready.

Now, you might say, well they're a bunch of spies and Bourne-type fanatics, and normal Americans don't really stand for all those torture shenanigans.

Except, then you have to explain how even in the heartland, in Iowa!!, in their efforts to quantify the behaviors of their most cherished possessions (after big-screen televisions and iPhones), Americans are funding and being paid for the torture of their children at the hands of academic professionals.

As we see, the study discussed here paid parents to bring in their babies to be abused by psychologists, who were curious about just how upset a tiny child would get if you conned him into believing he had just done a terrible thing—like breaking a very valuable toy or possession of the shrink-scumbag. Of course, after the child got through suffering for a couple of minutes, so each and every detail of its torture could be recorded, and the valuable data extracted from the tiny victim, then the shrink-scumbag would tell the child it was all just pretend, and nobody was at fault for anything—happy, happy!

I had thought maybe John Tierney, not always a very bright light, was just being incredibly sarcastic when he wrote "No harm, no foul, no guilt" at the conclusion of his article. But it seems he was sincere, and was taken aback when some readers actually questioned the morality of the testing. He searched for an answer from the lead "researcher", Dr. Grazyna Kochanska, who replied that "the children’s average unease or discomfort was very mild"—you know because they have a special device invented by the Gestapo for monitoring that sort of thing. The point is, Dr. Kochanska, the children's "average unease or discomfort" shouldn't have been increased by being tortured by you. Not for science, not because the parents said it was OK (because they wanted the $700), not for any good reason!

But the notion that it's OK, and even should be financially lucrative, for parents to donate their babies for psychological torture assessments, all in the name of learning how to hammer the kids into more manageable pawns in the hands of the war-mongering monsters running things in the year 2030, should not surprise us.

We live, and many of us thrive, in a charnel house. All the crap we learned about, that supposedly made the USA and the world it runs such a good and desirable place, so much better than others who had tried and died at imperializing, is shown to be papier mâché, a piñata of pomposities, begging to be bashed into a billion bits of karmic payback.

In the USA, every day, every week, every month, every year, it becomes a little more comfortable to be a monster.

(jk)