Outrage or Dismay?

Reading the news these days, I keep wavering between conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, I'm outraged at what our government has been perpetrating against human beings—many of which have been revealed to be innocent victims of an inane bounty system that encouraged the unscrupulous to hand over anyone, just to get their hands on a pile of dollars. It's not hard to see how such a program would lead to abuse. It's hard to see how it wouldn't.

On the other hand, I'm dismayed that so many Americans accept the premise of the current outrage, which is that this reprehensible behavior and these abusive policies are new and without precedent in American foreign policy. This is simply false.

In fact, any serious student of American history knows that the United States has routinely engaged in every imaginable sort of crime against humanity—from the illegal campaigns against American Indian tribes who'd been granted legal rights to their lands by the government that then ignored those treaties in favor of massacre and robbery, to the illegal funding of central American death squads in the 1980s. To spare you, I've left out scores of examples of CIA complicity in the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants between those two historical bookends, ranging from Iran to Southeast Asia to Chile.

Though plenty of readers in the United States will be confused and/or incensed to read the preceding paragraph, they'd be hard-pressed to find an educated Chilean, Guatemalan, Iranian, or Argentinian who is unaware of the deep and very dirty presence of the CIA in their domestic turmoil.

In fact, the United States has not just been guilty of these crimes against humanity, we've been teaching foreign soldiers and police how to abuse their own citizens in the so-called "School of the Americas":

Since 1946, the SOA has trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins.

On the third hand, I see a glimmer of hope—a very faint and distant glimmer—in the fact that this report (or, at least a summary) has been made public, albeit against the wishes of most of the American government, including the Obama administration. One or two stubborn senators can still do what's right, against the wishes of the powers that be. That's something. Not much more than a raindrop in the Sahara, but it's something.

Edit: Here's an excellent piece, published in The Atlantic on December 11th, 2014, that goes into further detail about America's history of torture.