Scary, and kinda sad

I don't know about you, but my first thought when i saw this headline was "Whose?"
Iraq 'torture complex' discovered

Continue reading Scary, and kinda sad

Things i know nothing about

I've never felt that being an expert on something is a prerequisite to having an opinion (and clearly this whole interweb thing shows that a lot of people share that view). When it comes to the CIA torture tape destruction, i've been content to read the people who really do know what they're talking about.

But here's a thought. Surely i can't be the only person in the world who refuses to believe that not a single copy of these tapes was made by anyone and squirreled off someplace to be released to the world at an inopportune moment, can i? I mean, humans are a species that can't even eliminate the last vestiges of smallpox. Someone burned a copy of those tapes onto a DVD somehere, dontcha think?

Continue reading Things i know nothing about

A persuasive argument

In which Alan Dershowitz loses the last vestiges of his credibility.

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

See, it worked for the Nazis. Of course it will work for us. Next, we round up illegal immigrants and others without proper documentation and ship them via railroad to special camps set up in North Dakota. That technique worked out pretty well too.

(via Jonathan Schwarz at TMW)

Continue reading A persuasive argument

Disgusting

Under the leadership of George Bush, the US has now descended to the level of Argentina under the generals, or Chile under Pinochet. This is the most shameful story i ever hope to read.

Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people they said were believed to have been held in U.S. custody and "disappeared."

The groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they filed a U.S. federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the 39 people it terms "ghost prisoners" in the U.S. "war on terror."

"Since the end of Latin America's dirty wars, the world has rejected the use of 'disappearances' as a fundamental violation of international law," professor Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University's School of Law said in a statement.

The report said suspects' relatives, including children as young as seven, had been held in secret detention on occasion.

The article goes on to quote a CIA spokesperson dismissing the charges. "The United States does not conduct or condone torture," he (Paul Gimigliano) said.

Which, as anyone who watched any of the recent Republican debates, or read Andrew Sullivan's recent article on the "Verschärfte Vernehmung" as practiced in Germany under the Nazis, knows is a bald-faced lie.

What the practitioners of this form of government never seem to learn is that it always ends badly for them.

Always.

Continue reading Disgusting