Dick Cheney…and Ultrarunning

One of my favorite reads is Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I. She gets pretty irate abut stuff and sometimes drops a lot of f-bombs, and I say, “I wish I’d said that.”

Well, she just did it again in this post.

A tantalizing excerpt. After quoting a USA Today piece about going after a Guatemalan human rights abuser, she says:

What about our own war criminals? What about the National Security Council of the Bush Administration, which discussed, with great specificity, what torture techniques were to be used?

No, we won't go after our own war criminals. We'll let other nations do that. Which is why you probably have not seen any of the senior cabinet members of the Bush Administration, other than maybe the Secretary of Agriculture (whoever the hell that was) take any foreign vacations since they left office.

This whole Obama “we’re looking forward, not looking back” thing is really just looking the other way. What a disappointment.

Sure, the torture of captives in Iraq and Guantanamo has very little to do—directly—with Ultrarunning. Probably nothing. But when I run trails I want to be comfortable in my own skin, to know that I’m one of the good guys. And if my President, the guy I voted for with a feeling of hope, wants to continue to sweep this utter moral failure under the rug, then I can’t rest easy.

This probably sounds utterly stupid, but for me the fact that the United States of America not only tortured prisoners, we continue to ignore what was done, kinda diminishes the whole wilderness thing. I mean, how can I blissfully run my trails and act like there’s nothing wrong? Conflicted doesn’t even begin to cut it.