An American Month
On June 1when I wrote "Shoving Your Nose in It" is Journalism's Job I had no idea of the significance awarded this month:
"I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year." [my emphasis, from Tomdispatch.org]
What author Ariel Dorfman relates in the link below is the human cost to both victim and perpetrator, recently depicted in the film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, about a British officer, Eric Lomax, tortured by a Japanese officer, who was a Buddhist monk, during the construction of the Bangkok to Burma railway, made famous in the motion picture Bridge on the River Kwai.
I never thought that in my waning years I would be writing frequently and earnestly to dissuade our citizenry away from the barbarity of torture. But I never thought I'd have to convince people about freedom of speech or separation of church and state either.
So here offered for your consideration another article you may decide against reading (this is rather reserved by comparison to others I have linked);
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