I was going to write my reaction to today’s NY Times investigative piece about how the Bush administration decided to break America’s historic ban on torture and then engaged in the politicization of legal interpretation to keep torture alive, but I can’t sum it up any better than Andrew Sullivan has.
As he writes:
Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret – and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged. They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know. And the decision to allow one man – the decider – to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants – is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism.
The only way this subject will stick is if we continually talk about it, long enough and loud enough that the corporate media notices and actually covers it for more than a soundbite. This should be the defining National conversation. Why isn’t it?
As Sullivan (remember- a Conservative) concludes:
We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?
