Viraj's Weblog

The above picture is brilliant in the way it conveys our globalization. Here we have a British Moslem with a Gap shirt in Afghanistan who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He's now on his way to Guantanamo courtesy of a US airbus.

This is a movie about a subject that bothers me deeply, and makes me sick to be an American. The story is about the Tipton Three, who were taken into US custody, tortured, and then released without charge. It's an account of the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, from the point of view of actual prisoners, rather than the spoon-fed garbage given to you on the news and by the US government.

You probably won't be seeing trailers for this movie on your local TV stations. No surprise there. I stumbled across the movie by accident, and I think it's an important one to see. Whether you believe it or not, it's important to see all points of view. I was absolutely appalled at the behavior of US soldiers portrayed in this film.

The term 'breaking down' is given to someone who after physical and mental pain, finally gives in and admits to whatever their captors want them to. But there is another 'breaking down' going on here, and it is of the US soldier. The moral barriers must come down. The goal is to reach a point where your prisoner is no longer a human. It is an animal in a cage. The pain the animal has is not associated to anything human. We cannot have a conscience and feel anything for it. We cannot anthropomorphize this animal's feelings. It has no central nervous system. It is a rat for our experiment. This rat in a Gap shirt can tell us where Osama Bin Laden is hiding. Good verses evil. Oh, and it helps if the enemy has darker skin than us, because then they look even more like monkeys.

This is the same reasoning the Nazis used on the Jews. Our captives are subhuman.

If there is anything that is building up negative karma, it is our 'wars.' It's hard to imagine NOT paying for such sins. The damage we do will come back to us twofold. I see the depiction on screen and wonder if we are really that stupid, that fucking insane, to not see the damage we are doing to ourselves. Can anyone honestly convince themselves that such treatment of another human being is for the good of our country? The true animal is the one doing the torture. This is primate brain function at its best. It's the primitive brain that can't comprehend non-violence. That would involve too much thought.

On a related note, I just purchased Oath Betrayed, which looks at the roles doctors played in our torture chambers.