(In light of this week’s essay by Seymour Hersh on the story of Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, I really want to share this piece from 1/23/2007)

When years go by as they have, with nerve endings pounding out this sense of shame from encrusted workings inside, utterly unshakable without damning the thoughts that come about around the time of acceptance and future endeavors and mind over matter, that toolbox of good advice more often spoken of than anything else these days, like a corner-man shouting at his fighter to stop thinking about the pain, man up, and stay away from the carbohydrates. Thus stalked by shocking reality video in his sleep, flashes of images and sound played backwards and then forwards, leading to screaming, shouting, running, curling up into a ball, with the vivid stench of excrement and urine the only thing that remains of you, all over you, inside your lungs, coating the insides of your sinuses, reminding you that life is happening all around you, within you, whether you can move or not, and the sounds that make their way into your world are the footsteps moving towards the door, ending the dream at that point for the 349th time, pillow soaking wet, eyes open and adjusting to the darkness that surrounds, nostrils still spiked with the tinge of that ultra-personal aroma five panicked gasps later, on through the life and times of a survivor.

Tell some people about what is done in their name by our government, and you get a faithful recognition that it’s all over their head, that reasons exist for everything that happens, and the spooks are keeping all of us safe in ways we are best not knowing about at all. The competence of whoever is providing the actual back-story to all of this isn’t something to be questioned, and to elaborate on the person I am writing about, it is common for the competence of government to be both assumed and considered inconsequential at the same time. Tortured an innocent man? Necessary. Left thousands to die in the hot New Orleans sun? Wasn’t the government’s responsibility. Convenient for the all-star lineup of stooges able to count votes of this persuasion without a single deed, but so often what is lost in all this is the very soul of our Republic.

Bring up the idea that such suffering is avoidable, and prepare to have “personal responsibility” spoken at you in response, which ultimately boils down in the end to this faith that the ends justify the means, and that when the United States imposes its will on someone, it is always the right thing, always to be supported, and always less of a blood bath than the leftists make it out to be anyways. Abu Gharib was the story of a single National Guard unit with poor leadership…as the story goes, on the historical fringe of reality now not as thick with believers and power, but still loud, absurd and convinced of the fact that to feel shame in response to the story of a man like Maher Arar being abducted by our government and outsourced to Syria on a whim to be tortured, would for some reason be tantamount to admitting defeat. The slippery slope, just like the domino theory and all the other choice scraps of bullshit eaten raw by the handful throughout the Republic, it is largely a lie such as this that tears down our humanity and exposes instead an apathetic lot of lazy-minded drones who are too cowardly and consumed by entertainment to bother considering whether the lessons of right and wrong learned at the earliest age happened to have accompanied them on through to adulthood, or were they largely chucked aside and considered quaint years ago?

Luckily the heart of Senator Patrick Leahy remains in tact, and at a specific point in his Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last week, the topic of Maher came up:

Leahy: He’s a Canadian citizen, he was returning home from a vacation. His plane stops at JFK airport and he is detained…He was deported to Syria…Those sending him back must have known he was going to be tortured. The US approved his deportation to Syria, and does not express any remorse about any of this. Why is he on a government watch list if he’s been found completely innocent by this Canadian commission which used information provided by us?

Gonzales: I’m not at liberty…I can’t do it today, I just can’t uh, badeep-badeep-badeep.

Leahy: Why was he sent to Syria instead of Canada?

Gonzales: Well, ah ah badeep-badeep-badeep.

Leahy: Can you tell me whether you took steps to make sure that he wouldn’t be tortured?

Gonzales: It is part of the public record that John Ashcroft has stated that we sought assurances…

Leahy: Oh…Mr. Attorney General, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to treat this lightly, WE KNEW DAMNED WELL IF HE WENT TO CANADA HE WOULDN’T BE TORTURED, HE’D BE HELD AND INVESTIGATED. AND WE KNEW DAMNED WELL THAT IF HE WENT TO SYRIA HE’D BE TORTURED, AND IT’S BENEATH THE DIGNITY OF THIS COUNTRY, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You know and I know, that has happened a number of times in the last five years by this country. It is a black mark on us. It has brought about the condemnation of some of our closest and best allies. They have made those comments both publicly and privately to the President of the United States And it is easy for us to sit here comfortably in this room knowing that we’re not going to be sent off to another country to be tortured, to treat it as though, ‘well, Attorney General Ashcroft said he got assurances’. Assurances? From a country that we also say now, ‘we can’t talk to them because we can’t take their word for anything’.

The question I have is whether or not it’ll become something for all of us to think about, the folly of our aggression towards progress as a human race, and how a pathological sense of entitlement has caught a hold of our country in the years since 9/11, to the point where an innocent person can be stolen, broken and tossed out with the garbage, and it takes years before they are provided even a hint of justice, a whiff of it to cut down on the night terrors and that horrible smell of one’s waste and fear mixed together, inside the pores, the brain, the nerve endings…

This is Maher Arar with his children. He was murdered by our government. His body remains alive today, but what good is it? What right do we have to deny this man justice? How are we more noble or righteous than the terrorists when this can happen and our government hasn’t even an apology to offer?