Metacentricities

A post on what’s going on around torture, and the amazing extent to which this administration will go to not only defend its use, but to promote it, has been brewing in my brain for weeks, now, and it doesn’t seem to be gelling. Just around the time it began gelling, it got ungelled by the newer stuff around the possible use of Napalm and White phosphorus by our troops in Iraq.

That link above (from Kos) has lots of good info that I won’t repeat here. There was also an Italian documentary (video) that has more claims, some disputed, apparently.

Not that any of this is new, of course. We have a long history of using nasty weapons against people, both military and civilian. And we have an entire infrastructure (DARPA, which also gave us the internet) designed to find new and interesting ways to kill people.

Luckily, much of the congress, at least, understands the issues of torture, and is working to stop its use by the administration. Many communities of faith have made statements condemming the use of torture. 

Let’s get real here. We are the world’s only superpower, and there isn’t much anyone can do to really, honestly hurt us as a country. China, the only country a reasonable person might suggest is close militarily, would be committing suicide to attack us, given the fact that their economy largely depends on us. Yes, 9/11 was horrible, but likely at least an order of magnitude more innocents have now died in our "war on terror". I think enough is enough. We don’t need torture, nor chemical weapons, nor invasions to solve the war on terror. If anything, that all makes it so much worse.

How long are we going to let this go on? I know I’m pretty much preaching to the converted, and I’m realizing this feels much like stuff I’ve said in 20 zillion ways before, but I’m getting pretty tired of reading new and nasty things each day about what we’re doing to other people in the name of our "war on terror." I think it’s time for a "peace on terror." Responding to terror with peace is the only thing that will stop it. More violence whether it be conventional, or unconventional (torture and chemical weapons) is, as we see vividly every single day (like today’s attack in Jordan) only perpetuates the problem, it doesn’t ever solve it.

In a harrowing story about the Israeli army using high speed planes to create sonic booms (28 in one week, many in the middle of the night) over the Gaza strip, the one of the last lines of the news story is this:

"The military was forced to apologize after one of the sonic booms was unintentionally heard hundreds of kilometers inside Israel last week."

So it’s really OK if they cause stress, miscarriages and anxiety in innocent Palestinians, who have experienced probably hundreds of sonic booms by now, but it’s not OK if people inside Israel are scared by one.

There’s lots more info on this on BoingBoing, but I’m using this to inagurate a new topic, called "Inhumanity". Think of this topic as the worst examples of how we, everyday, break, or condone in some way the breaking of the "Love thy neighbor as thyself" commandment.