Description

The choices over using or not using torture, and over imprisoning people based only on the fear that they might someday do us harm, are not just about choosing a strategies to collect needed information and keep our country safe. They are also very much choices about the kind of world we want to live in and the kind of world we want to create by our own actions. To be part of a culture that engages in torture and fear-based-imprisonment is to choose a world where creating and inflicting terror is acceptable, where exerting utter power and control over the minds and bodies of defenseless people is normalized. It is not only the victim of torture whose sense of connectedness to others and openness to the world is shattered. The torturers and the allowers of torture are also shattered, numbed and disconnected from other people. We all live in the very same world that we ourselves are making more brutal by the minute, all the while muttering to ourselves, “they started it” and “they do worse” as if to drown out the knowledge of what we are doing.