To err is human



All right

So I made a mistake.

I’m only human, even if I do work for the CIA.

And I still want people to think I’m a hero.

Look, after 9/11, things got crazy.

I started seeing terrorists under every bush.

I saw them crashing down every American city street, sitting on every seat behind me on every airplane flight.

I even thought I saw them under my son’s bed back home.

Over seas, it was even worse because everybody there hates Americans claiming we’re too greedy.

So it is hard to tell who is a terrorists and who simply got the raw end of a business deal from one of our corporations.

But the moment I saw this guy in one of the local hangouts ranting and raving about how we Americans were no better than the Nazis I knew he had to be a terrorist.

As a true American I knew it was my duty to do something about this scum before he came over to our country and tried to kill some of our kids.

Hell, I took pride in doing my duty and grabbed the punk right off the street.

Of course he tried to tell  me he wasn’t involved with no terrorist group.

But all crooks claim their innocent.

To avoid having any of his terrorist friends try and rescue him, we took him out of the country to a place where the government was much more in tune with American interests.

Leaders there didn’t care what we did to fools like this as long as we didn’t do it to local leaders like them.

Sure, there were times when I felt bad.

I’m not like some of my fellow CIA agents. I don’t get my kicks out of torturing people.

Maybe even down deep, I felt a little guilty. Most CIA veterans understand that everybody – citizen or not – has basic civil rights.

The founding fathers did.

And I’ve struggled most of my career trying to come to grips with the fact that American or not, people shouldn’t be mistreated.

This got worse the more this son of a bitch squirmed.

It almost hurt me as much to send electric shocks though him as it hurt him.

I had to cover my ears not to hear his screams when we yanked out his fingernails.

If he hadn’t kept calling me a Nazi I might have eased up on him.

At times like these I’m extremely grateful for our training. How we are taught to put aside our doubts.

We have to think about God and Country, and how many good American lives we are saving.

And this far from New York City and Washington DC, we get to do things we couldn’t do back home, without some liberal lawyer trying to protect the rights of terrorists.

But the more this guy screamed and protested, the more convinced I was he had something to hide.

What a hideous plot this one must be if he kept it so quiet after all we did to get it out of him.

I kept thinking about my own home town back home and about my kids, and figured they would die if I didn’t stop this bastard.

In fact the more we tortured him the more pissed off I was at him.

How dare he and other terrorists think they could hurt Americans when they weren’t fit to shine our shoes.

That’s when I really laid into him.

I wanted him to know that we Americans could be as vicious as any foreign terrorists.

And with no liberal lawyer armed with hundreds of rules, this bastard was either going to talk or die.

And frankly, I didn’t care which.

I saw myself as getting even for every one of those innocent people who died in the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

I was making this one terrorist pay for all those terrorists we couldn’t catch.

And finally, the bastard admitted the truth, telling me as he bled and cried that he was a terrorist after all, and that he had more attacks planned for America.

The problem is: he wouldn’t shut up.

He blabbered on and one, taking credit for the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole, and he might even have taken credit for Pearl Harbor if I didn’t stop him.

That’s when I got scared, thinking the White House wouldn’t be happy with us going so far, especially because this fool was only telling us what we wanted to hear.

And we were stuck with him out in the middle of nowhere, a man driven made with pain that he stopped making any sense.

I saw my career going up in smoke, not because we tortured an innocent man, but because this could be an embarrassment to The President.

The White House didn’t give a damn about our torturing an innocent man as long as we didn’t get caught doing it.

When I told the poor fool we weren’t going to hurt him any more, he cried and kissed my hands.

I didn’t even show him the gun until I pulled the trigger.

No one would know he even existed.

We took a lesson from the Nazi and burned the body, crushed the bones and scattered the ashes and bone fragments in the wilderness.

Sure, I’m still proud to be an American.

Maybe I do feel a little bad about what I did.

But what’s the old saying: to err is human.

The next time, we’ll make sure we got a real terrorist.

 




Main Menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crystal clear

Image
    I clean the windows once a week, squeaky clean so I can see the whole street, as there is no glass at all, and I see every detail of every tree and house the smudges blind me to sometimes. I have no acute fascination with what goes out there or in the houses of my neighbors; I just don’t like not knowing things, half the reason I troll news websites knowing I won’t like or agree what I get yet determined to know what it is I disagree with. My neighbors think I’m nosy because they see me when I see them, and they snarl at me when I come out to collect the newspaper from my doorstep, saying untrue things perhaps to get me angry. I mostly don’t talk with them when I don’t have to, and I listen to them only when they complain about my dog being off his leach and leaving not-so-friendly calling cards on their manicured lawns. Sometimes I see too much, the domestic disputes through their unguarded windows, shades down as husband-and-wife shout things I cannot hear, kno...
Read more

Oh what a strange trip it’s been

Image
  They’re all gone. The people and the visions. Though the living room looks like Kansas after Dorothy left it. Food strewn across the carpet, revealed in the orange wedge of sunlight as I throw open the porch curtain to let in fresh air. The place smells of pot and hormones -- ashtrays overflowing with the endless parade of more ordinary cigarettes. Butts even float in the bottoms of almost empty wine bottles. I smell him, the stranger who stalked my girlfriend all night, giving us both hits of LSD as if the each tiny tablet was key for his getting between her legs. His heavy cologne stains me with the outraged I was too stoned to stop. She slumbers in the other room alone as I stand naked, bathed in sunlight. I am changed. A chemical reaction running me in a way I can’t describe, as if I was the rape victim, as if my virgin thoughts have been violated by the light show and the hallucinations, s if I am some new person craving to get back to what I once was. I’m too scared to wake...
Read more

Am I in hell?

Image
The wind blows across the Texas Panhandle like sandpaper across my face, a harsh sun making this dip south feel like a trip through hell. I think of LA and how much I miss its dismal streets and how I ache to get back to a place where rain takes a whole season to wash the world away, rather than this place which dumps it all on you at once after months of slow scalding torture. I keep thinking I’m already dead, despite the doctors’ claims – they asking me again and again if I’ve ever used a dirty needle or made love to another man. They make assumptions about me because my driver’s license says I live in LA. They ask me for a list of lovers, then shake their heads when I give them one, trying hard to make out the boy’s names from the girl’s, and wondering how on earth they will manage to contact them all, eyeing me as if they suspected me of deliberately spreading a plague. The car radio naturally stopped working in St. Louis. So I feel again in the glove compartment for the box of bat...
Read more