Sometimes you have to hang back. You become aware of something, and you go charging hell-bent-for-leather into the topic. And by god – you are preachin’ the gospel. That is what I was doing when I first read the Seymour Hersch article on Saturday evening.
And then it hit me. The reason I was so fucking mad is because what I was writing about is the invalidation of my entire life, spent in service to the Constitution of this nation.
That is the net effect of what is revealed in Seymour Hersch’s article in The New Yorker. Everything my life has stood for up to now is null and void. I’ve suspected for quite some time, but now I know for sure. I feel stateless. You might as well revoke my god-damned citizenship, because I am a woman without a country.
The perfidy of the Bush administration, well documented and so vast as to be overwhelming, has undermined the Honor Code and the confidence of – and in – the officer corps.
At this point, I don’t have to rehash the article. Everyone has read it who is going to. But I am going to excerpt the passage that made me livid and enraged me:
When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”
(Let me answer that for you, General. You stand the fuck up for the ideals that your uniform represent, and you stand up for what is right because you are a god damned General, and by definition a leader of men, and when you act like a punk you are a disgrace. You stand the fuck up and you aren’t too chickenshit to even look at some god-damned photographs.)
Here is how I see it. We have destroyed the military and trashed the Honor Code, and as far as I can tell, the chain of command is as quaint as the Geneva Conventions, the Great Writ, and the Constitutional guarantee of Due Process (rooted in the Great Writ “Set forth in the Meadow Runnyemead”) – all of which have been sacrificed on the altar of the “Global War On Terror™”
Rumsfeld lied to Congress – under oath. He needs to face the consequences of that action. Plausible deniability my ass. Common sense needs to trump weasel-words in this instance.
If these bastards get away with this – then the American experiment is over. It is that simple, and that much is at stake.
Constituents, what say you?
