In Our Name. With Our Implicit Consent.

Well, it's come to this. I'm quoting Froomkin,, who's quoting from this Sunday's WaPo. But the final lines of this are too important to miss:

Chilean novelist and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman writes in The Washington Post's Outlook section with the story of the first torture victim he ever met: "He confessed to anything and everything they wanted to drag from his hoarse, howling throat; he invented accomplices and addresses and culprits; and then, when it became apparent that all this was imaginary, he was subjected to further ordeals.

"There was no escape.

"That is the hideous predicament of the torture victim."

Dorfman concludes: "Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the 'intelligence' that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Everyone is corrupted who does not march in the streets to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace the darkness.

It's too easy to look in the mirror and say, "I despise torture. I don't support torture. I even wrote my Senators a letter about torture." Are you less guilty than Bush, who longs with every cell of his body for torture? Yes. Does that matter to the man being beaten and waterboarded? To the woman being raped while listening to her child's cries? No. It doesn't matter to them. They are in too much pain for degrees of nicety to matter to them. It was done in your name, with your tax dollars, with your implicit consent. You consented on the afternoon that you watched tv instead of demonstrating. I consented on the evening that I came home to my fall garden instead of blocking the WH driveways. It was done with our tax dollars, in our name, with our implicit consent to trade that woman's rape for our own convenience, excuses, momentary safety.