Sunday, September 24, 2006

"Are We So Fearful?"

Ariel Dorfman, author of the widely performed play Death and the Maiden, has a powerful essay on torture in today's Washington Post. He asks,

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

A good question, certainly, but so is this one that Dorfman also asks: "Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?"

Read his essay here.