Flying around wondering about secret prisons

I sometimes have to fly places for business reasons. This is a highly distasteful part of my life, because I hate the TSA with a passion. It embodies the height of government arrogance and stupidity.

I cite as an example of this idiocy the new signs in the Atlanta airport which indicate severe penalties for joking about bombs and/or terrorism. The colorful new signs are all over near the security checkpoint. I would have taken a picture of the signs, but that is probably considered a crime as well.

Let us ask ourselves — are real terrorists likely to skip through the airport laughing and telling bomb jokes? Do human monsters who will be soon be boarding the plane with evil intent walk toward that plane while loudly recounting humorous anecdotes about that time in Scotland when they took over a plane using only a book of strike anywhere matches and a D-cup sized bra from Victoria’s Secret.

Anyhow, the Transportation Security Authority does nothing to make me feel secure. And signs warning travelers that inappropriate jokes will result in imprisonment remind me that increasingly, the United States is NOT the land of the free. My guess is that most people who get belligerent and make inappropriate statements while moving through security are doing so because security is a joke. Some of them may be rebelling against being treated in a way that is discourteous. Others may simply feel offended by the fact that compliance with modern American airport security is more about compliance than it is about security.

I digress though. This post isn’t about the TSA.

This post is mainly about the gentlemen I sat next to on the plane last night. He is a former soldier who believes that the U.S. military routinely tortures people to death. I politely told this gentleman that if I ever had any proof of such activity taking place with official sanction from a general level officer, I would immediately request a dismissal from the remainder of my contract to serve my state and nation.

I want to know, am I completely in the dark? Are there secret programs where we torture human beings by cutting their off fingers and shoving high pressure water pipes up their asses and subjecting them to electric shocks in senstive places? I’m sure we’ve had isolated incidents. But I believe that the U.S. military would punish such activity appropriately, once it was discovered. I don’t believe the vast majority of U.S. troops would willingly participate in such events as torture and murder.

The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families”

–William Schulz, Director, Amnesty International USA

Physical torture is inappropriate for civilized human beings to inflict on other humans and should not be an acceptable form of extracting information. If our Constitution protects citizens from cruel and unusual punishment, then it should also protect our enemies from the same thing.

You cannot advertise yourself as the home of the free and the land of the brave if your government supports secret prisons, illicit torture and disappearing people. It would be morally wrong to support such a government, anywhere in the world.

Killing in self-defense is acceptable. Murdering and torturing human beings, even the ones who want to murder and torture you, is not.

I know my government is stupid enough to muck up the process of providing security to civilian travelers by treating them all like a million herd animals, but I do not believe my government is evil enough to systematically create secret prisons where it tortures and kills prisoners with the blessing of general level officers.

What do you believe?

Update: Mustang has some good comments over at Social Sense on this issue. According to the stats he publishes from Rueters, the percentage of credible torture allegations being investigated that resulted from 28,000 interrogations is 10. That’s a percentage of less than .035 and doesn’t indicate any type of systemic or officially supported prisoner abuse.

Similar Posts:

• Feel safer yet?
• Supreme Court proves socialism is alive and well in U.S.
• FAA revokes pilot’s license for flying too near White House
• Quotas, bureaucrats and abominations
• The Fair Tax Plan