Down the memory hole

Allan Uthman points out that by limiting the torture debate to waterboarding, all participants in the torture debate are effect colluding to erase from the national consciousness much more horrifying crimes committed in our name:

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about forcible anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect…

The upshot is this: America is the country that rapes its prisoners. We’re sex criminals. That’s our thing now. And Obama’s refusal to “look back,” i.e. prosecute these incredibly serious crimes, ensures that it’s our permanent legacy. No national reputation can survive this simply by shrugging it off. We used to be seen as a bastion of freedom and decency around the world. That shit is over, folks. We’re like the Soviet Union with better movies now. When we talk about human rights, we are an international joke.

And when we talk about torture, we stick to waterboarding, because nobody, not even the “liberals,” are willing to face what we’ve done.