For God's Sake

Oh, no. This isn’t funny at all.

We try at the Blasphemy Blog to be funny even when discussing serious things, but we’re at an end of our ability to be funny. We are aghast. On the news they’re talking about Senate rules, which are important, but they should be talking about the fact that American soldiers are beating innocent people to death. This is very important.

We are so tired of this. It happened in Iraq, it happened in Cuba, and now it is clear that it happened in Afghanistan. Maybe this is some kind of multi-continental conspiracy to make America look bad in the eyes of the world. But we just don’t think that’s the case. We believe that employees of the United States military, representatives of our nation, did beat a man until his legs could not bend, did then chain him to the ceiling, and did leave him there until he died. We believe this for two reasons.

First, the evidence is sworn testimony of other soldiers who were present at the time. We don’t think that soldiers would lie under oath about other soldiers in this way.

Second, we know that this is the sort of thing that happens when people are in prison. Prisoner abuse by prison guards is common everywhere in the world. This is because prisoners are considered the lowest of the low and rarely have anyone to advocate for them, and often don’t have anyone who even cares what happens to them. Also, being a prison guard is a stressful, low-paying, unrewarding job with little prestige. When you give people who are under stress absolute control over people no one cares about, this is the sort of thing that happens. The solution is to instill discipline in the guards, and to make basic human decency toward even the lowest in society a fundamental goal.

We, as a nation, have not done this in our military prisons. We’ve got to turn this around. Nothing less than our national soul is at stake.