Unfortunately, we used them, not Saddam.
This kind of makes it hard for the U.S. to take the moral high ground, yes? Of course, we lost that high ground when we started engaging in Saddam-like torture.
What’s left to say about this administration? My final straw was snapped long ago. And it’s hard to confront this news without becoming seriously unhinged. But in a steady stream of trusts abused, incompetencies, and really, to speak plainly, flat out malevolencies; this is some kind of new, profound disappointment, quite outside the weekly outrages and the ridiculous wrongs one can take with some healthy humor or a sense of reasonable anger.
I take no joy that the administration will be hurt politically by this news. No prideful pang that I was proved right about some essential evilness inherent to the other. No, I just feel resignation. Resignation and shame. Shamed to be an American about right now. That we committed an act as gruesome as this on civilians in Iraq. I can’t even stomach to point the righteous finger right now. To say that people in this administration should be awaiting trial before The Hague. I’m not looking score points, partisan or otherwise. And I hate having to ascend some high-minded vantage, like an ego-stroking scold, and express what can only be described as bitterness. I had thought I was cynical before, jaded to whatever this administration could do. But this is the final indictment. The point at which no person of clean conscience and basic human dignity can continue to provide apology. And I know such debasement will continue. But what’s left to say to the apologists? Spitting their humiliation into a soft poisonous wind that I can feel whizzing past my neck as I walk away.