Dear Friend and Reader:
It’s confirmed — the Bush administration approved and conducted torture to extract information from prisoners during the “War on Terror.” The methods violated international and American law, and were widely considered illegal by everyone except the administration and it’s legal advisory. This week, by his own volition (i.e., not forced to by a court), President Obama released memos from 2005 detailing the intimate justifications for torture between high ranking legal professionals and administration officials.
According to these people, the United States is able to hold other countries to standards that it does not have to follow…
Steve Bergstein is Planet Waves’ civil rights columnist. In two parts, he spells out how torture demeans us, undermines the integrity of the rule of law and where we’re to go from here. He writes:
One of the highest ranking government lawyers, Steven Bradbury, who ran the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel (which advises the president on legal issues) baldly stated that “we recognize that as a matter of diplomacy, the United States may for various reasons in various circumstances call another nation to account for practices that may in some respects resemble conduct in which the United States might in some circumstances engage, covertly or otherwise. Diplomatic relations with regard to foreign countries are not reliable evidence of United States executive practices and may be of only limited relevance here.”
Check out this column at Psychsound.
With so many questionable practices by this administration i guess it just got thrown on the pile. Fast asleep and de-sensistized…Swept up in the terror momentum and all that murky rhetoric. I retain hope that the 60s energy has just been lying dormant for a bit…
I have to wonder why, knowing that this torture had been going on for a long time, as a society we did not fight harder against such atrocities and abuse of power. The energy of the 60’s seems to have been lost to our clinging and desire for security at the cost of so many.