a response to postings on this Monsters & Critics article.
Nobody here is suggesting that Americans be weak on the field of battle. I wholeheartedly believe that violence should indeed be met with violence, and the aggressor forced to STOP. It is the hallmark of a just society that violence be employed only when NECESSARY, and not merely when DESIRED.
By the philosophical position of the earlier poster, it should be legally and morally justified to (for instance) imprison and torture my boss for unjustly denying me a raise and ruining a recommendation. You bet I'm angry, upset, and taken advantage of. He might deserve a horrible fate, but surely it should not be legal to impose it.
Due process is the fundamental cornerstone of freedom. By abusing detainees, we truly abuse ourselves, for it is but an accident of legal fiction that most of our own citizens have yet to be classified in such a way that they may be treated in this manner. Once it is allowed for the state to abuse individuals, there is little to stop those individuals from being one of us. We must make our moral choices as though we were deciding for the entire world. In order to be Just, our actions must survive scrutiny across the SCALE of our entire government, and those of other nations, were they to choose the same course. If you believe it OK for agents of the state to torture individuals, then you are truly un-American in the political sense. This country was founded to preserve the rights of men, and the concept of due process, in direct opposition to the then-existing political systems of the world.
If your family is brutally murdered by a psycho/terrorist/whatever, I will not judge you for personally destroying them in vengeful rage. However, the state, being the both the steward and servant of its citizens must never be allowed to act in such a way. The state has no excuse for vengeful rage. Its first duty is to protect its citizens from threats both internal and external. Opening the moral door to internal torture and process-deprived detention is a failure to protect its citizens even before abuses are committed. The excuse that these detainees in question are enemies is no excuse for vengeful rage of the state. If our political philosophy of due process is moral and just, then it is applicable and must be applied to all of those with whom our nation interacts. Otherwise, we are a nation of hypocrites and deserve no moral pedestal.
Many assume that we are right in whatever we do merely because we are Americans. This is the lunacy of faith. A geographical accident of birth does not make a moral man. Intractable belief in his own righteousness does not make a moral man. Ethics and morality are HARD. Every day, and every year, each situation must be examined. The moral man must examine his own motivations, actions, and effect on the world around him. He must question his own judgment, for mere faith is not a moral baptism.
The other unspoken assumption of those who condone torture of detainees by the state is that this activity will keep us safe. This is patently, ridiculously, false. Torture serves only to satisfy the blood-lust of the torturer. Torture does NOT produce reliable intelligence. Period. This has been demonstrated, and this view is endorsed by those who should know. Torture paints us as ugly hypocrites in the eyes of the rest of the world, and we lose respect as a people - respect that used to be a safety net against attack when traveling abroad. Torture puts our citizens in danger as targets. It puts our captive troops in further danger of retribution. It puts our policies at risk of abandonment by our allies.
It is a sad, but inevitable human fact that our country's history is rife with heinous violations of those lofty principles on which it was founded. It's saving grace is a structure and ethos which strives to overcome its shortcomings. The undermining of that ethos will be the downfall of America.
If this country ever wishes to truly embody the "shining beacon on a hill" as described by Ronald Reagan, we cannot smear feces from the gutter on our reputation. Protecting our reputation is not something to be done with Public Relations and the hiding of our dark activities, but by refusing to engage in those dark activities in the first place, exposing the workings of our government so that none have reason to suspect we do otherwise, and by punishing those among us who betray our ideals of freedom, fair treatment, and due process, for they are truly not Americans.
Gary Weber (as quoted by Forbes) on BSE testing:
"It's not cost-effective; it's not necessary. The consumers we've done focus groups with are comfortable that this is a very rare disease and we've got safeguards in place."
You Asshole!
That doesn't indicate that the food supply is SAFE, it indicates how well your propaganda campaign is working! This is about FOOD SAFETY! HELLO!!!!
Still think the cattle lobby doesn't have a strangle-hold on the Department of Agriculture?
Maybe they think the average American consumer can't do basic math, so let's extrapolate some basic numbers here:
Roughly 1000 head of cattle are tested for BSE daily.
That's 360,000 per year. They've been testing at this rate for two
years. That makes roughly 720,000 animals tested in the last two
years, and they've found 2 cases. Now 1 in 360,000 may sound like
good odds, but take this two steps further:
35,000,000 (that's million) cattle are slaughtered in the USA annually. 1 BSE case in 360,000 expands statistically to 97 AFFLICTED CATTLE PER YEAR. Where are the other 96? In your hamburgers. How many burgers does one cow make?
A quick Internet search turns up ball-park figures of 450-700lbs of net meat per animal. Other figures put the amount of burger meat on a single cow at around 150lbs. That's 150x1/3lb burgers (conservative large burgers) = 450 burgers. But wait - since the slaughterhouses don't neatly package a single cow into a single package, in reality your burger likely contains meat from 40 cows. So multiply those 450 burgers by a distribution factor of 40: 18000. Wow. 1 infected cow can show up in 18,000 hamburgers. And we're not even counting the steaks, corned beef, pastrami, etc. So 18,000 burgers multiplied by 95 cows reveals a staggering possible 1,710,000 tainted burgers in the good ol' USA EVERY YEAR. Wow. There are fewer than 300,000,000 Americans. That's 1 buggered burger for every 175 Americans.
Still hungry?
Now please, before anyone gets too upset, recognize that these are shady, back-of-the-envelope calculations. But if you're going to tell me that the beef supply is safe, REDUCING TESTING IS NOT THE WAY TO DO IT!
The USDA's claims that "we only found 2, so everything's cool" statement is akin to saying "we looked with our eyes closed and didn't find anything, so don't worry." If there is proper science and good statistics to back this claim up, then they'd better goddamn produce them. If not, your safest bet is to assume that it's a bald-faced lie to protect the cattle industry. And if there's one thing we know about this administration, they take care of their own.
I have a recommendation. It's very "conservative" (i.e. free market):
Just a thought.
-E