I’m choosing to take it as incredible evidence of American faith in our democracy that anyone can still be shocked by the dirt-bag actions of the CIA. This is an organization that renders innocents to torture prisons overseas, that trains death squads, that overthrows governments and assassinates elected leaders. Now the CIA admits to destroying “for national security reasons” tapes of the torture sessions in which they extracted key evidence against men tried in America— “evidence” got from torture that lawyers for the administration denied took place and that, if the torture and dubiousness of said evidence had been revealed, would have exculpated the men on trial and ended all hollow pronouncements by the president that “we do not torture.” Perhaps it also would have headed off the tagic-comic turn of events that has the ridiculous Republican candidates for president out-doing each other to take the low road by arguing to officially adopt waterboarding as just another tool of U.S. diplomacy, a mere “heightened interrogation technique,” the torturousness of which is alleged by the Republican front-runner merely to depend on the level of skill, I presume, and moral fiber of the good men and women trained in such black arts.

What recourse do the citizens of this country have in the face of (1) torture and (2) destroyed evidence of torture and (3) torture testimony being illegally used as evidence in shoddy embarrassing trials and (4) official bald-faced admissions to erasing tapes of torture and (5) official unabashed transparent excuses made about “national security”? What recourse? How long do we put up with the same unacceptable news of the actions of our leaders? How long do we bear with the mounting evidence that we have become victims of a tin-pot dictator’s regime?