Time magazine has an article on the Obama transition’s plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and move the detainees into the legal system.
Time magazine has an article on the Obama transition’s plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and move the detainees into the legal system.
The Washington Monthly devotes its full issue this month to articles arguing for a ban on torture. The Bush administration’s continual demand that we must be allowed to torture prisoners is the greatest blow to US moral standing in my lifetime. Plus, it makes me sick. Here’s how the magazine introduces the issue:
In most issues of the Washington Monthly, we favor articles that we hope will launch a debate. In this issue we seek to end one. The unifying message of the articles that follow is, simply, Stop. In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishingly—despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib—we remain one. As we go to press, President George W. Bush stands poised to veto a measure that would end all use of torture by the United States. His move, we suspect, will provoke only limited outcry. What once was shocking is now ordinary.
President Bush has since vetoed that bill.
There were also two articles this weekend on the language of torture that are worth reading. Fred Clark muses on how newspapers have stopped using the word torture. William Safire explains the origins of the word waterboarding, which used to be more commonly referred to as “water torture.”
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No backtracking on torture
One of the reasons people hate politics is the hypocrisy of it all. Politicians excuse behavior from their allies that they are eager to rebuke from their opponents.
Perhaps the most shocking recent example of this was the Republican effort to eliminate the filibuster when they had the majority in the Senate and House until 2006. After decrying the filibuster as an unconstitutional travesty for years, the Republican minority in the current Senate has used the filibuster more than any other Congress in history.
Now we see Democrats who were unequivocally against torture equivocating. The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to make people aware that it’s going on, and for voters to let politicians know that principles shouldn’t change regardless of who’s in the White House. So that’s what I’m doing.