Blogger Gerry Tatham: Former administration's torture policies an exercise in sadism

Torture of helpless persons powerless to fight back is the sub-human behavior of bullies and tyrants. There is no excuse for deliberately, maliciously inflicting pain and humiliation on anyone. It simply isn’t done!

Only a power-hungry brute labels his victim “terrorist” as he, himself, proceeds to terrorize that victim. An administration that does so while flaunting its “Christian” values deserves to share a special hell with other sub-humans who crucify their enemies.

Torture is against all rules of civilization: foreign, domestic and conscionable. It is hardly a formula for peace. And now, the former vicepresident and manipulator of George W. Bush’s puppet strings warns that if we don’t continue his indecent perversion of “justice” in the name of “National Security,” we’re asking for yet more attacks. Whatever you say, Dick Cheney.

The bully is essentially a coward, and cowardly sniping from behind the throne was Cheney’s criminal approach to unregulated tyranny. Like the wife-beater, he feels safe from retaliation as long as he can depend on the helplessness, fear and/or stupidity of his dependents. And his cruelty will somehow be their just desserts for any deviation from his rule.

He can lie, cheat, change laws to suit his own purposes and blame the other guy for the result. He can hide his distortion of democracy from the congress and then accuse them of being part and parcel of his own revision of the law via crooked, incompetent lawyers.

The insecure male who needs to assert his masculinity by bullying a woman is a Dick Cheney writ even smaller, and I propose the following example: In an argument with a friend who lied to herself that her husband’s abuse was somehow warranted and that he was a gentle and remorseful man when sober, I registered my proper disgust with her goody-two-shoes concept of Christian martyrdom:

“Ernie is not your “cross to bear,” I informed her. “He doesn’t beat you because he’s drunk; he gets drunk as an excuse to beat you. Without his alcoholic crutch, he’d have to face the responsibility for his beastly behavior.
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Torture on the national scene is exactly this form of wife-beating exercise in deliberate cruelty, and it isn’t done. Not just legally, not just morally: it is barbaric behavior. The laws against it are universal; they are the fundamental restrictions that separate man from beast. They are society’s soul.