Normally if I let a link sit around this long before posting about it, I’d let it go, but this one is particularly important.
I don’t have much to add to this article by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, but I wanted to link to it because it’s important. US citizens who were tortured by the US military while they were in Iraq are suing Donald Rumsfeld personally for authorizing the violation of their Constitutional rights. Both cases have won on appeal against attorneys for Rumsfeld and for the US government, who have tried to have them dismissed for a variety of reasons.
As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am completely against torture and I define torture broadly. If you’re one of those people who believes that torture is OK as long as it’s reserved for the worst of the worst, what you must understand is that it never works that way. The “worst of the worst” gets defined down until everyone falls into that category. In this case, the people subjected to torture were whistleblowers who worked for the US government.
You might argue that’s obviously immoral and illegal, but nobody has ever been held accountable for their treatment. And that brings us to a sentence from her more recent article on Dick Cheney’s memoir:
By deciding to repudiate torture while doing everything in its power to protect the torturers, the Obama administration has succeeded in elevating not only Cheney but the idea that, in America, some torturers are too important to be punished.
Right now the only thing standing between the United States and a torture regime is the Obama administration’s promise that it will not torture detainees. That’s not nearly enough.
I’d strongly encourage you to read both articles. I’d argue that the second describes the cause of the effect described in the first.
As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy’s father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door.
Fareed Zakaria in Don’t panic. Fear is al-Qaeda’s real goal. That’s the smartest thing I’ve read on the underpants bomber to date.
The numbers being repeatedly cited over the past week about the number of former Guantanamo detainees who have “returned to the battlefield” are, in all likelihood, total speculation. It’s propaganda. Don’t believe it.
These men were captured under various circumstances, held at Guantanamo Bay without charge, and then released without ever having been charged with any crime.
First of all, happy birthday to my friend Paul, who doesn’t read my blog.
Sometime soon I’m going to write about how being a programmer makes me think differently about toothpaste. In the meantime:
The Obama administration is withholding federal money promised to Mexico for fighting drug trafficking because authorities in Mexico torture suspects. As you might imagine, the Mexican government sees this as hypocrisy.
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