A timeline of the modern torture state

A timeline of the modern torture state

by digby


Former defense lawyer and police watchdog Walter Katz has written an important post that illuminates a sense that a lot of us have about all this:  the United States has a culture of impunity for anyone at the top of the social hierarchy.  He specifically delineates the through line from the torture regime of the Bush administration to the rather recent acknowledgement that police on the streets of America are literally getting away with murder. It's a fascinating timeline of events showing how 9/11 opened the door to the gloves coming off in more ways than one, not the least of which was this notion that the whole world is a battlefield, including the streets of America. The sight of those tanks rolling through Ferguson Missouri made that very real.

I would argue that the rampant taser abuse is part of this as well. I've entitled many of my posts on the issue "Dispatch From Torture Nation" for just that reason.  There is no substantial reason why the logic of torturing suspected terrorists  would not be applied to  torturing suspected criminals.  If you engage this argument with torture advocates, they'll sputter something about terrorists being worse than other people but in the end, they know that what they're saying is that might makes right. We are the "good guys" and they are the "bad guys" and you don't need to worry your pretty little heads about anything else.  It's a classic authoritarian mindset.

Even the fact that Wall Street was given a pass on its criminal behavior vased upon the rationalization that while they might be criminal, the institutions they represent are too important to our system to risk destabilizing the economy with a mundane application of simple morality. We can't take the risk.  We are in grave danger.  Run for your lives.  Better to accept that this is necessary, that we live in a dangerous world in  war without end, the need for markets to run free lest the whole system fall apart, the need for governments to do what ever they think is necessary to keep the babies safe.

Katz concludes his 9/11 to Ferguson timeline with this observation:

In each of these instances there was an act of state violence which has literally led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and lifelong physical and emotional scars for those who were “merely tortured” or willingly served our country. At the very most, only low-level participants are prosecuted and only rarely so. In the meantime, poor civilians are nickle and dimed for traffic tickets which they can only pay off by filling jail cells and a 12-year old boy is gunned down by an unstable cop for goofing around with a pellet gun. At the lower level of society, there is zero tolerance for the slightest transgression but for those in power – even a young beat cop – there is impunity.

And he quotes Isabel Allende:

I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse. In our species, the alpha males define reality, and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules. The rules change all the time, but they always benefit them, and in this case, the trickle-down effect, which does not work in economics, works perfectly. Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom.

Authoritarians know this instinctively. It's the rest of us who have to keep learning the lesson over and over again.

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