Our War’s most disgraceful legacy

There are many. It’s hard to pick just one. But here is a solid contender.

Quote of the Day

Luckily for the witness, they don’t allow naked pyramids and simulated electrocutions in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

That was from the Washington Post article on William “Jim” Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former top lawyer, who was interrogated (conspicuously un-tortured) by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Watch FBI Director, Robert Muellar being asked questions he should have been asked some 4 years ago. Answers apparently, not mandatory.

Arguably, the most offensive legacy of Iraq and 9/11 is our nation’s tolerance and acceptance of torture as necessary foreign policy. When we started disregarding civil rights and privacy rights through unwarranted phone taps and snooping around library books, there was outrage and then “9-11-cannot-happen-again” counter-arguments.

But surely all of us draw the line at human rights violations. Turns out, I am mistaken. Watch the US Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), conceding that torture “is not a nice thing to do” (among other cringing idio-cities).

Officially, McCain is against torture, but he voted against the Feinstein Amendment that would have:

the U.S. may not (i) torture; (ii) engage in cruel treatment prohibited by Common Article 3; or (iii) engage in conduct that shocks the conscience, under the McCain Amendment. He also insists that waterboarding violates each of these legal restrictions, that the Bush Administration’s legal analysis has been dishonest and flatly wrong, and that we need “a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program.”

The Feinstein Amendment would have accomplished all of these objectives.

That McCain is such a Maverick. He will say he is against torturing people, and then vote go ahead and torture people.

Read more here and here and here.

The assessments of 11 men formerly held in U.S. detention camps overseas revealed scars and other injuries consistent with their accounts of beatings, electric shocks, shackling and, in at least one case, sodomy, according to the report by Physicians for Human Rights. Most also had symptoms of long-term psychological damage, including post-traumatic stress disorder, the group said. [...]

All 11 men were eventually released from custody without being charged with crimes.
(more)

We can no longer pretend we didn’t know war crimes took place in our name, by our country.

~ by Sonia on June 19, 2008.