BY KAREN WEBB

Torture is justified and patriotic, but only when administered by the USA.

The Senate investigation into enhanced interrogation – or the exact same type of interrogation we executed Japanese interrogators for doing after World War II – has really ticked off George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Cheney says whatever was done was justified and not torture. Bush says anything done by the CIA to detainees was patriotic.

Since they are saying that anything done by the CIA is perfectly all right, then it must be patriotic if it is the enemy doing it to our guys.

The North Vietnamese were being patriotic to John McCain and all of those other guys? It is the Bush/Cheney way. If we are doing it then it, no matter what it is, is all right, justified and patriotic. However, if any other country is doing it, especially to our soldiers, then it is torture.

You can’t have it both ways.

I want to make a suggestion that we just get really justified and patriotic and use the same non-torture and see if we can get Cheney to tell us the names of the people on his Energy Task Force. Maybe we can get both Bush and Cheney to come clean on who told them about the weapons of mass destruction and what were the real reasons we invaded Iraq when they had nothing to do with 9/11. Maybe they can explain why we attacked Iraq and Afghanistan when all but two of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.

Neither of these guys has been anywhere near combat. They have treated this entire war and our soldiers like they are some bloody game of Risk and, by the way, the guy who captures the Middle East wins and that isn’t going to happen by this kind of treatment. Instead of it being a deterrent, it creates more suicide bombers because these guys are prepared to die for what they believe in.

I saw Zero Dark Thirty and I can’t imagine anyone that considers themselves a patriot doing any of those things. If true patriots use vicious dogs, sleep deprivation, small cages not much bigger than a medium size dog carrier, waterboarding and all kinds of stuff, then here is one U.S. citizen who would just as soon not be that patriotic and I would definitely not like having any of that patriotic activity done to anyone I know by our enemies.

Remember, the war was going to be over in months – and I don’t think they were suggesting 132 months.

– Karen Webb lives in Moore, OK and is a frequent contributor to The Oklahoma Observer