Sunday, November 14, 2010

Torture Nation

Here's a bit from a Brad DeLong post:
William the Bastard asserted the right to kill and torture--but he admitted that he had to justify what he had done to his tenants-in-chief afterwards. George W. Bush and Barack Obama say that what they do doesn't have to be explained and doesn't get to be reviewed by anybody.
Who was foolish enough to claim there is moral "progress"?

I'm convinced that the days of garroting, eye gouging, burning at the stake, public beheadings, and the joys of the Roman Colosseum are soon to return. With leaders like Bush and Obama setting the pace, these should be showing up soon.

This is disgusting:
In his new memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush boasts that he not only granted his permission to water-board detainees but did so cowboy-fashion—with the words "Damn right." This admission has elicited barely a ripple of self-doubt among an American public that reconciled itself long ago to the twin propositions that torture can sometimes be legal and that every terror suspect is always a ticking time bomb.
When you think "ticking time bomb", consider the year that Maher Arar spent in a Syrian dungeon with daily "treatments" of torture at the behest of the US because of a "mistake" in paperwork by Canada. Where is the ticking? Where is the bomb? All I see is an innocent man illegally seized and shipped off to be tortured.

Here is the real state of "justice" in the US:
Eric Holder and Barack Obama have taken pains to tell the American people that water-boarding is illegal torture. So what? That's just their opinion. President Bush disagrees. The persistent failure to hold anyone accountable at any level for years of state-sanctioned abuse speaks louder than their words. It has taken this issue from a legal question to a matter of personal taste. What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer. This is precisely the kind of sliding-scale ethical guesswork the rule of law should preclude.

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