I just recently received one of many unwanted, much-circulated articles supposedly written by some (according the FWD info) “regular person,” this last one coming from one of my relatives, who simply does these drive-by, passive-aggressive forms of conversion techniques. Reading the article caused me to seethe with resentment. In it, people who don’t believe in torture the way they do are called, basically, unpatriotic, and the whole article is steeped with the justification of what was done to “supposed” terrorists in we Americans name. Within the letter, article, whatever, it touted the goodness of America, Canada, and all of those considered basically “us.” At the same time, the letter vilified those who are basically “them.” the Muslims, the bad guys, whom they consider as lesser beings, and, I understand, not worth the basic rights afforded by the Geneva Convention.

As I read all this tripe, it dawned on me that these people, all of them, including Dick Cheney, are people I have met before. They are the grownup version of the high-school bully.

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I can remember how these types of people would terrorize people using their strength, their size. If anyone disagreed with their views, their stance, their clothes, they were made fun of and publicly humiliated. They were sometimes even tortured (though, of course, they would not consider themselves torturers, even then). How many of you reading this remember titty twisters, kids put into lockers, those “funny funny” wedgies, or a ton of other intimidation tactics? I remember the popular girl in high school who teased me unmercifully, making my life a living hell at times. Their abuse, and setting themselves up as superior to others, was how they caught and held their supposed power. The people abused by them often just cowered, or hoped that the bullies would be caught in the act. (At the time, none of us had ever heard of Columbine, except as being our state flower).

For my part, I remember finding two such boys picking on the smallest kid in the school. He was afraid of everything, typically nerdy. He had glasses, looked funny, wore very conservative clothes, and jumped if someone looked at him. His folks had told him not to take anything, like candy, from anyone because it might contain LSD (they were, obviously, not very helpful to the poor young man). The day the bullying happened, the two bullies had put the young boy’s books (which he carried with him, so no one could hurt them) in the trash and had just picked him up to do the same. I came around the corner and laced into them, both of them towered over me, but I didn’t back down. In the face of my anger, they gave him his books back and let him go. I was so angry at them that there was no fear in me. These bullies were laughable to me, and I had righteous hot anger. Wrong was wrong. I wonder why we, in general, don’t remember this.

I use this as an example of what happens when bullies get power over others. All these bullies know is fear because down deep they are truly afraid, usually of everything. Both the boys I stopped that day, as I found out later, had horrible home lives. Their anger and fear was the reason they wanted to make this young man’s life awful. This is what, I believe, we have had happen here in America with torture. It was fear that made our government’s representatives reach out and break the law, putting in place policy designed to hurt the people who represented to them all that happened on 911, and, in this way, resolve their own guilt of inaction. It didn’t matter whether or not the people were guilty. I don’t think it mattered to them whether or not they got correct information. To them, these were not people anymore, they were objects to take out their anger on. It is this same fear that makes the people defending the torturers not stand up and call them into account. They truly buy into the fear that if we take away these advanced interrogation methods, we will be in danger. They also want the ability to watch all their fellow Americans, just in case we might do something they fear. It’s why all we hear from the Right Wing is fear mongering. If they can keep people afraid of whatever (Russians, Terrorists, or whatever other booga-boo), they can do whatever they want to.

However, I believe we must stand up to the bullies, if we want to remain the free country we have been until now. If we don’t stand up to the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, and Bushes of this world, we become part of the problem. The boys in the hall each had me by over one foot in height and one of them, a football player, by at least 75 pounds, but I stood them down. Why did it work? Because in their heart they knew what they were doing was wrong. When I hear Vice President Cheney talking about how with this torture policy they kept us safe, I see his fear, and so far, he is keeping all the other children in the political playground buffaloed, because there are people who are still afraid of everything. 

Now, I come to the historical part of this. The first example I chose was the Spanish Inquisition.

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Oh, the image here says, “Exurge Domine et Judicia Causam Tuam (Psalm 73), or Rise up, Lord and Judge Your Cause. (”They that are far from thee shall perish…”–Motto of the Inquisition, Psalm 73)

How many of you remember that from history? The bully (or bullies) in the playground at that time was the church. They sought out heresy and witchcraft with great zeal. Their confessors tortured people, and their proof the accused were guilty was the fact they were accused. They were tortured until they confessed or they died. The whole thing was about moving the church into new territories (make your own comparisons here–you know–oil fields, spreading democracy the hard way, and so on, and so on) and about the removal of women from power. It was not about truth or proof. The accused were killed. Right or wrong, they were killed. There was a huge change of power and property during that time, all in the name of God.

What did we learn from this time in history? We learned that an individual will confess to anything if you hurt them enough. They will say things that aren’t true, just to keep from being injured, just as they were trying to get today’s accused terrorists to say what the people in power wanted them to say. Everything I have heard indicates the “enhanced interrogation techniques” resulted in wrong information, and I still can’t believe there isn’t an absolute outcry for the past administration’s heads on a proverbial platter. After all, remember this, all of you, it was false information that got us into Iraq, false WMD. They were false leads who put our children in harm’s way, who got our sons and daughters killed, not to mention the Iraqi dead or dead from our allied countries. (I say our children because my children also served in the military during this time, and my nieces and nephews, as well. So far we have been lucky in our family). 

By the way, the wisdom about what was known about witches in those days dictated that they be thrown in water to see if they were witches. If they drowned, they were not. If they floated, then they were and were put to death. There were also marks to look for, a second nipple, for instance, for “the devil to suckle on.” I have a relative who has one of these, by the way. It does happen. They can look like a mole and often occur under the arm. Under these guidelines, they would have put my relative to death (she happens to be a devout Christian). In some cases, people were stretched on the rack until they confessed. On confession, they were put to death (the pain stopped too). If they didn’t confess, they died under torture or languished in prison until they died. This is why many confessed, even though burning was often how they were executed (burning purged the soul).

In this country, we also had our witch madness. The most famous was in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. I recently visited the “Witch Museum” there. I knew the story because in our tiny town in Colorado when I was growing up, my sister was in the play, “The Crucible.”

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For those of you unaware of this story, some young women (teenagers) in the town proclaimed they were cursed by witches in the town, having fits to prove it whenever the ones accused of witchcraft were near. Anyone thus accused was put to the “question.” Many languished in prison (we saw the prison, horrible ugly thing).

Upon confession, they went to the hanging tree.

The one man put to death had made the mistake of thinking it was all hysteria and said so. He thought it would “pass.” He was pressed to death because he would not answer the “question” either yay or nay (he was not accused of witchcraft, just of “consorting” with them). He simply said, “More Rocks” and met his death bravely. I met a descendant of his here in our town. She explained that he did what he did to protect them. No matter how he answered, if he answered their “question” either way, his heirs would lose their inheritance. Amazing isn’t it? Once again, there were no real choices here, and people often confessed to whatever they were accused of simply to stop the pain.

When we move forward to more present-day torture examples, we have to go no further than the Vietnam War. During that one, our soldiers were tortured by the Vietcong to get them to say the Vietcong were good guys and we Americans were the bad guys.

Under torture, some of them broke and said that–though they recanted later. If you look just a bit further back, you find out why we agreed to the Geneva Convention agreement on torture–including water-boarding. Our own fathers and grandfathers were tortured by the Japanese, using (you guessed it) water-boarding and other tactics. We called the Japanese and Nazis war criminals and put them on trial for crimes against humanity.

My whole point here is that whether it is the bully on the playground, the bully in Vietnam, the bully in Salem, during the Spanish Inquisition, or the ones in Washington, they are bullies–just bullies. There is a very old saying, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” This is something I agree with totally. The people I have met from the Middle East, way back when I was in college, were kind and friendly. They cooked for me, we ate together, and I learned some of their music. We were all just young college students trying to get a degree. I treated them like humans; they did the same. I came away with a good feeling about them and their country. I hope they felt the same. I feel the same way about other people I have met from many other countries–Africa, Japan, Germany, France, and Russia–just to name a few.

In this world, we have bad guys and bad guys, and not all of them are on the other side. However, what turns someone into a torturer is not seeing the tortured as a person who cries, hurts, sings, and loves. In the case of the schoolyard bully, the kid being tortured (according to the bully) deserves it because he is different, and inside, the bully fears him in some way. In the case of the government as a bully, their victims are usually from a group of people perceived as possible enemies. Please don’t take my word for it, research the concentration camps American Japanese were put into after World War II, simply because they were Japanese. The reasoning was that it was Japanese people who had attacked Hawaii. Therefore, we might be harboring evildoers among us. Remember, these were American Japanese. No matter how we okay it, it still boils down to the bully on the playground. One of the biggest “bullies on the playground,” at least politically, was Joseph McCarthy, who had a righteous goal of seeking out communists in our midst. Many of the same scare tactics he employed then have been used quite freely over the last eight ears. To be accused, to be on a list of possible “Reds” was as good as a conviction. Many innocent people lost their jobs, their freedom, and sometimes their lives. Being a student of history, when I heard people bandying about the word “socialist” so freely and people calling other people un-American if they didn’t agree with Bush-Cheney, I saw the bullies had returned to our country and, for a time, were in charge.

Now they aren’t. It is simple. We voted them out of office, and now they need to pay for playing fast and loose with the law, and our freedom. After all, we are bringing the bullies on the playground to justice. We now have zero-tolerance policies in place in schools all over our country. Do you remember why that came about? I mentioned Columbine above. It was that act, that horrible act, which came about because bullied kids rose up against those they perceived had wronged them (it certainly didn’t make them think those bullies were the good guys), and a bureaucracy that allowed it. Sad to say, our school bureaucracies did allow it. I say this as a teacher, and a student, who became aware of many teachers who thought it was a normal “trial of childhood” and ignored incidents they could have stopped.

The bullies in the government need to be brought to at least as much justice as children, for our government representatives, and therefore we, have broken the law. We were within our rights after 911 when we went into Afghanistan. However, when our government at the time lied to us over and over, broke the law, and said, as Nixon did, that when the president does something it is not wrong, we were wrong. People in this country go to jail for breaking the law. People get fined for speeding, and kids, for torturing and bullying other kids, get expelled and even get jail time. I want to make it clear that I feel the people who have done this, who have taken the country’s good name and smeared it all over the place, need to be punished. They need to face justice. We run our country by the law and our president and his staff should not be protected from that law. Might does not make right, and nobody should be exempt from justice. These acts, these horrible grotesque acts, were wrong. These people, our representatives, who led our children into harm’s way and left them open to retaliation, which is (as I said above) what people want for injustice (perceived or real) were quite simply wrong, and no suspiciously-authored, drive-by e-mail can make it okay.