Moral Choices

by Mary

The other day I asked my friend, "What is going on with Wisconsin?" She told me, "It's people like my mother. She is supporting Bush because she can't bring herself to vote for Kerry, the baby-killer." Whoa.

Turns out her Mom is a devout Catholic and she cannot get past Kerry's position on abortion. So I asked her, how could her mom, who was clearly choosing from a moral framework ever consider voting for Bush? After all, voting for Bush was voting for a war that is deeply troubling and most likely voting for more war in the future. If she was worried about the moral implications of voting for Kerry, then she should really worry about what she is endorsing by voting for Bush.

What are some of the policies that a vote for Bush endorses?

• Wars of choice without adequate cause in order to exploit the "slipstream" of chaos.
• Supporting the killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
• The use of torture and "disappearing" of human beings.

  Rumsfeld then authorised the establishment of the highly secret programme, which was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets. The SAP - subject to the defence department's most stringent level of security - was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The people assigned to the programme recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from US elite forces - navy seals, the army's delta force, and the CIA's paramilitary experts.

  "Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target - a stand-up group to hit quickly," the former senior intelligence official told me. The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice. Fewer than 200 operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Myers [Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff], were "completely read into the programme", the former intelligence official said. "The rules are 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'"



• Overt cruelty to those who are in our power.
  

  There was, obviously, a difference between the reality of prison life in Guantánamo and how it was depicted to the public in carefully stage-managed news conferences and statements released by the administration. American prison authorities have repeatedly assured the press and the public, for example, that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were provided with a minimum of three hours of recreation every week. For the tough cases, however, according to a Pentagon adviser familiar with detainee conditions in mid-2002, at recreation time some prisoners would be strapped into heavy jackets, similar to straitjackets, with their arms locked behind them and their legs straddled by straps. Goggles were placed over their eyes, and their heads were covered with a hood. The prisoner was then led at midday into what looked like a narrow fenced-in dog run - the adviser told me that there were photographs of the procedure - and given his hour of recreation. The restraints forced him to move, if he chose to move, on his knees, bent over at a 45-degree angle. Most prisoners just sat and suffered in the heat.



• Indiscriminate use of force.
  

  Gen. Hoar believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it -- after the election. The signs are all there." He compares any such planned attack with late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoar. "U.S. military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase 'collateral damage.' And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."

Voting your conscience is commendable. Voting to support the actions and policies of this administration should make moral people highly conflicted. Perhaps the answer is to vote for someone else. My suggestion is to vote for Pat Paulsen if you can't see yourself voting for either one of these guys.