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| credit Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle |
This week's news was dominated by the CIA horror show revelations. The agency, which after all was only following orders, took the unprecedented step of holding a press conference at its Langley, VA headquarters to defend itself from the avalanche of disgust and disapproval. The argument has erroneously reduced to whether or not torture led to usable information, such as leading to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. The salient point is that torture is 1) illegal under international conventions to which the United States is obligated; 2) it is immoral, and 3) torture is so inconsistent with our expressed national values and criminal code that its use is "
out of bounds". People seeking someway to justify its use often resort to the unlocated nuclear bomb in a suitcase scenario. That scenario lives mostly in comic books. The only country that possess such miniaturized nuclear devices is, you guessed it, the United States. The way to stop a portable nuclear device being used is to
negotiate complete nuclear disarmament, not argue about whether torture is ever justified.
The cartoon expresses the fact that drones have become the weapon of choice in Obamawars. Yemen alone has suffered 18 drone strikes in 2014 according to the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism against islamist jihadis resulting in 22 civilian deaths. The Bureau estimates
that for every targeted individual, twenty-eight other people are killed.