Sherry Chandler

Articles such as this one — U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons — break my heart (and I am not one to use emotional language lightly):

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.”

Kevin Drum defines the trap we have dug for ourselves by using torture:

…once you’ve been the subject of government-sanctioned torture alternative interrogation techniques, you’re automatically forbidden to defend yourself because you might tell people about the very alternative interrogation techniques that were employed against you.

This highlights the fundamental corruption of the human soul that torture causes. We know it’s wrong, so not only do we torture prisoners, but we then do what we must to conceal what we’ve done. And then we try to conceal even that. Torture and secrecy, secrecy and torture, world without end.

That’s not America. At least, it shouldn’t be.

A blackmark against our country forever. And these things always come out eventually. So it’s a futile effort that just makes us look worse and worse.

Time, I think, for full public disclosure. Time to vote this government out of power.

For Philip Zenshin Whalen
d. 26 June 2002

(and for 33 pine trees)

Load of logs on
chains cinched down and double-checked
the truck heads slowly up the hill

I bow namaste and farewell
these ponderosa pine
whose air and rain and sun we shared

for thirty years,
struck by beetles         needles
turning nasty brown,
and moving on.

—decking, shelving, siding,
stringers, stubs, and joists,

I will think of you         pines from this mountain
as you shelter people in the Valley
years to come

— Gary Snyder, danger on peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005)