Today's New York Times editorial, "On Torture and American Values," is a powerful statement against what the Bush administration -- and its Republican enablers in Congress -- have done to our country:
Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper's front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.
The only thing I'd add is that anyone who authorized torture or participated in torture should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Yes, that includes President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and whoever else disgraced America, broke the law, and betrayed their oaths of office. Only with justice will we once again prove that we are a nation of laws and morality, one where nobody can get away with what the Bush administration has (so far) gotten away with.
Respect for Human Rights
Respect for International Law
Diplomacy before Military Action
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of the Press
Separation of Church and State
Constitutional Checks and Balances
The right for the American people to elect their own president.
13 months until we elect someone to end this National nightmare.
John Dean is right -- the current Congress must ensure that the statute of limitations for torture and war crimes is long enough so the Bushies and the bad apples within Blackwater and elsewhere cannot avoid prosecution.
Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII
Interrogators Fought 'Battle of Wits'
By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 6, 2007; A01
For six decades, they held their silence.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.
Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.
I believe that, since Congress is not going to impeach the President or Vice-President, both individuals should be turned over to the Hague for prosecution, just like other vicious violaters of human rights. Or, failing that, maybe let the Spaniards deal with them, just as the Spanish judge nabbed Pinochet. One way or another, they must, must be held to account--- and the leadersheep in Congress refuse to do so.
It is, I am convinced, not simply the lies about WMD, fixing intelligence, the authorization of torture and its continuance under fancy cover-up mis-names, but the very invasion of Iraq itself which was illegal plus the brutalization of the Iraqi people which is now being matched by the brutalization by the insurgents. The amount of hate being created by America and being stored up by our victims will take generations to dissipate, if ever. Talk about bad Karma!
Here is the content of the comment I posted at dailykos:
here's a snippet:
>blockquote> George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase "enhanced interrogation technique". By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that "any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful".
So is "enhanced interrogation" torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the "third degree". It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.
The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform - they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation - and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).
The Nazis even argued that "the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement". This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration's house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheney's arguments. Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to all detainees, including those out of uniform. They didn't qualify for full PoW status, but they couldn't be abused either. The court also relied on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and international law: "The court found it decisive that the defendants had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims, and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment . . ."
The entire piece, which appeared in The Times of London and is entitled "Bush's torturers follow where the Nazis led" can be read, courtesy of ICH, A href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18515.htm">here
I have forwarded this to Congressional staff, candidates, and the like.
I think Sullivan has given us a powerful argument. If we prosecuted Nazis for a technique, then how can we justify using that technique without ourselves being like the Nazis? How can ANY justification remove those who use or authorize such techniques from prosecution as war criminals?