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Vous dites que vous êtes mon juge, avisez-vous bien de ce que vous faites, car en vérité, je suis envoyée de par Dieu et vous vous mettez en grand danger.

You say that you are my judge. I do not know if you are! But I tell you that you must take good care not to judge me wrongly, because you will put yourself in great danger.

Joan of Arc

How do we breathe, when a government can stoop no lower in its penchant for hypocrisy, lies and pointless violence against innocent people?

I expect that few of us have had the time to read all the details of the US Senate’s torture report yet, but it confirms what many had already said the CIA were doing to detainees, although now in a lot more horrifying detail. Not simply at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (Gitmo), but at numerous “black sites” throughout the world.

Of particular concern is the fact that at least one person actually died under the CIA’s supervision as a result of deliberate neglect and mistreatment. Such events do more than upset the constitutional and societal norms mentioned in the report as fundamental parts of the United States that had to be defended if the so-called war on terror (ostensibly a war for the defense of liberal democratic ideals) was to have any merit. They challenge the notion that the United States is “exceptional”, and thoroughly discredit all of its rhetoric of moral superiority over other states or even the terrorist organizations it sought to combat.

I believe that the United States’ belief in “exceptionalism” – something that Barack Obama has himself affirmed that he believes in – is the reason why the United States perpetrated these crimes. A belief that one is exceptional and morally mightier than others leads to a sense of immunity from prosecution, a sense of being above international law and a sense of being entitled to perpetrate the crimes that the US has gotten used to accusing other regimes of. This same delusional sense of exception and immunity is why the United States is giving military assistance to a dangerous dictatorship currently responsible for massacring thousands of civilians in Ukraine and endlessly threatening the security and integrity of Russia.

Just as the torture report cracks the sanitized, friendly neighborhood mask from the face of the world’s most abhorrent and cowardly country, America’s support for the military dictatorship in Ukraine bankrupts its moral standing on the international stage. As I recently explained at Press TV, the supposed academic theories of democratization portrayed by the US as a path to peace are reduced to folly.

The path of the United States is the worst path for any country to follow. It is the path of sordid and blood-splattered hypocrisy, the incarcerated millions, of torture and endless dictatorship. A regime that suffocates its people is a coffin; it will draw its supporters to the grave.

The question the American people need to ask themselves is, how do they breathe? Many of them already chant in street protests that they can’t – a slogan based on the dying cry of Eric Garner – a man suffocated by another member of America’s executioner force like so many others. This is no digression.

The United States’ failure to guarantee the human rights it preached has many facets, foreign and domestic, each of which challenges everything that America imagines itself to be. The sense of immunity that white police officers have in their treatment of African Americans is the same sense of immunity that the torturers and executioners in Guantanamo had – a culmination of institutionally racist thoughts and policies anchored in America’s traditions of racial segregation, super power arrogance and paranoid militarism.

Get the full guide to my theory of politics and technology in Catalyst below:

Catalyst: a Techno-Liberation Thesis (2013)

By Harry J. Bentham HJB Signature and stamp

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