This Week In Tyranny
Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 08:04PM A bit hat tip to Prairie Weather for the post “Torture, brutalities, and secretive, illegal trials conducted by CIA and US military commanders continue”. The NY Times and Washington Post stories cited are perfectly reasonable examples of what we can expect from a secretive and authoritarian executive. We shouldn’t even pretend to be outraged by such conduct by now inasmuch as it’s the logical outcome from that situation. An instructor of mine once said “nothing happens to us that we do not create, promote or allow.” This is now ours.
The phrase “Verschärfte Vernehmung” is German for “enhanced interrogation” and we convicted Nazis at Nuremburg for using it. The same phrase is used to describe the torture we’ve engaged in and allow to continue, and by the way while we’re going through these semantic exercises and trying to break through the President’s stonewalling there are flesh and blood people whose lives are wasting away. Even if they are guilty of every crime cooked up in the fevered dreams of our leaders we should consider it beneath us to leave them in limbo. Of course as digby notes there’s a reason for that: “The only solution they can think of is to just keep them locked up forever, like monsters they created in some scientific experiments gone wrong.” Um, and by the way the rest of the world notices too.
Attention Brits: We have streamlined the definition of extradition. I’m sure that’s not a problem right? Oh and Fox News viewers, none of this is really happening. Go back to sleep.
Finally, an idle question: Anyone hear from David Obey lately?
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