Mad that hundreds of men and women are being held and tortured without legal recourse;

Mad that such actions only make the rest of the world angrier at America and therefore more likely to attack us in the future;

Mad that a handful of powerful men are destroying our chances to bring about resolution in the Middle East.

And mad that at one point I dreamed of being a part of it all. Seriously.

I was a junior in high school when 9/11 happened. I waved the flags, prayed for our troops, and supported the Patriot Act. I even went a step further—I decided that I wanted to join the CIA. Already fascinated by international affairs and politics, I was enchanted by the thought of accessing/gathering raw data, traveling, and serving my country.

It wasn’t until spring semester of my sophomore year that I changed my mind. I was meeting with a ret. Marine Captain to plan my course into the agency, via military intelligence. Near the end, I told him how excited I was at the prospect of developing my analytical skills in combination with physical ability. He paused.

“Um… actually you probably won’t be analyzing much, per say. Why don’t we focus on getting you physically prepared?”

That was all he had to say. It suddenly struck me. As an operative I would be a tool. Thinking isn’t a skill you want in a tool. (Imagine a hammer looking up at you saying “Um, are you sure you want to hit the nail again?”) I valued my capacity for individual thought too much to be reduced to someone else’s tool.

Three years later, I am so incredibly thankful I changed my direction when I did. It has since become clear to me that the CIA, military, and Bush administration were not who I, in my teenage naïveté, supposed them to be. Silly me. I thought that only the “bad guys” tortured their prisoners. They were the ones with secret prisons and sensory deprivation techniques. I was wrong.

Yesterday’s BBC headline says it all:“US Interrogation Policy Condemned”. The adjacent BBC side panel reads, “CIA ‘Secret War’”, listing key stories over the past few months: “CIA admits water-boarding” reads one. “Inquiry into destroyed CIA tapes” reads another. And, my personal favorite, “US ‘may’ use waterboarding again”.

Yet everyone tries to pretend that we are still the “good guys.” The US Senate Armed Services Committee’s 18-month investigation continuously illustrates this duality:

On the one hand someone admits that yes, water-boarding has been used and may be used again,

then on the other hand, the Bush administration says that all detainees have been treated humanely.

There is no such thing as humane abuse.

Luckily I decided to follow my own path. But I often think of those who choose to follow their patriotism and idealism– those who perhaps discovered too late that Americans do torture, that presidents lie, and that wars are not just. And that makes me mad.

[photo courtesy of www.ongoing-tales.com]