By Jill McLaughlin 
This essay is dedicated to my father, who two months ago on his death bed, told me two things. Being well aware of my activism and my commitment to stop the crimes of our government one of the two things he told me was, “I know you get mad about things that happen, but try not to take life too seriously.” So I have attempted to write a humorous segue into a very serious issue of our times. Here goes.
“George, why must you torture the children?” Mary asks imploringly with tears in her eyes. We all know the scene. Well most of us anyway who have found it to be almost an obligation to watch its A Wonderful Life year after year. Personally my two favorite scenes are the one when the dance floor opens up to a swimming pool and the one when George has walked the lovely Mary home from the dance. The two are flirting furiously with each other. George is committing to Mary that he’ll lasso the moon for her. The old man on the porch next door yells,“Why don’t you kiss her instead of talking her to death!?” But I digress.
Anyway, George Bailey has come home in the midst of a brewing financial crisis that could ruin him. He is behaving erratically. He’s threatened the husband of Zuzu’s school teacher. He’s yelling at Petie to stop banging on that piano. When Petie apologizes to him George realizes he’s coming off as a monster and tries to soothe things over by telling him to go ahead and play. Yet Petie, Janie, Tommy, and his wife Mary can only stare at him in terrified disbelief. George can’t take the fact that they see something is very wrong even if they don’t know what it is so he yells at Petie to go on and play the piano, but Petie can’t. He is too hurt and afraid and Janie begins to cry. At this point Mary puts it to him, “George, Why must you torture the children?” He can’t answer that. He indicates that he is in terrible trouble and leaves the house. One could liken Mary to the people in this country who during the Bush Regime dared to ask “Why must we torture and indefinitely detain people?”
Mary is not willing to let the brewing financial crisis excuse the behavior of her husband. So too are a growing number of people under the Obama administration not willing to let an economic crisis and other issues be used as a reason to excuse the crimes of their government and let it go unaccounted for. Yes there are a number of us Marys out there. O.K. I hear the snickering and the snorting among my LGBT brothers and sisters already. But this number is not what it should be. No, I’m not saying there needs to be more LGBT people…not that there would be anything wrong with that. Oh you all Know what I meeeaan so stop laughing and let me go on.
George runs to Mr. Potter, his nemesis, to beg for a loan. Mr. Cheney…umm I mean Mr. Potter goes at George “Look at you. You used to be so cocky. You were going to go out and conquer the world. You once called me "a warped, frustrated, old man!" What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help. No securities, no stocks, no bonds. Nothin’ but a miserable little $500 equity in a life insurance policy. You’re worth more dead than alive.”
While Cheney, in today’s real scenario around the torture debate, is a dead ringer for Mr. Potter, Obama cannot be completely likened to George Bailey. Obama can only be likened to George Bailey in that like George, Obama wants to conquer the world. What has happened as evidenced by both Obama’s and Cheney’s speeches on Thursday is that a fight has broken out among the ruling class as to how to run the torture state better. Those among the ruling class know that the empire needs torture in order to keep the rest of the world in line. As far as the Democrats are concerned the Bush Regime was too out front with its torture and detention. The people were appalled by torture and they wanted to see it stopped. Cheney for his part is out there defending the crimes of the Bush Regime, telling the people that the way did things worked to keep Americans safe and he is also defending himself from prosecutions. Torture is an integral part of the war on terror and the war on terror is about keeping the empire running. This is why Obama is working so hard to rebrand torture and indefinite detention. The way Cheney and the Bush Regime gang handled the torture state has posed a real problem for the Obama administration, which still needs the torture apparatus. It needs it so much that at once, Obama is both rebranding it and also saying there will be no release of the photos and no prosecutions for Bush era officials for authorizing it and those C.I.A interrogators who carried it out.
Release of the photos and prosecutions would expose what this so called “war on terror” is about, which is empire. More deeply it would expose what this U.S. Empire is about. People would begin to see that this is a rotten system and that the problems encountered are not just bad policies and mistakes. People would begin to see that this is system that cannot be perfected to operate in the interests of the people anywhere. This is what those in the ruling class fear. Like Mary Bailey we should never stop asking why our government would commit such heinous crimes and we need to understand it more fully and act to stop these crimes. For further emphasis and analysis on both how Obama is rebranding torture and how prosecutions would expose the empire I encourage the reader to read Larry Jones’s Obama Repackages Bush Program of Torture, War and Alan Goodman’s Two Reasons Why Obama Refuses to Prosecute.
Just because the Senate has voted to block the release of some 2000 more photos of torture carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan does not mean that the torture issue is all sewn up for the powers that be. Rather the fight that has broken out among the ruling class on how to carry torture forward should be seen as an opening for the people who hate whets being done in their name to change the terms of the debate. People need to put out there that “Torture is a War Crime, Prosecute!” They need to break through the American chauvinism rhetoric put forth by both sides of the ruling class and say that torture is wrong and never acceptable under any circumstances. May 28th National Day of Resistance to U.S. Torture provides a way for people to make this loud and visible.