Tortured Logic: Cheney Says It’s All Greek To Me?
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Violation of the bovine restrictions in the Geneva Conventions by using a minotaur for "enhanced interrogation" in an unnavigable labyrinth?
Say it ain’t so.
Apparently Dick Cheney really wanted a griffin for the interrogator job, but he was too flighty.
Ahhhhh, The Onion.
Bless them for taking our policies and media to the extremes. And, in the process, making it crystal clear how far we’ve really gone over the edge of the cliff.
Eugene Robinson lays it flat out:
For the Bush administration, torture was a delicate business. The aim was to injure but not incapacitate — to inflict precisely enough pain and terror to break a subject’s will, but no more. To calibrate the proper degree of abuse, the torturer needed an accurate sense of how much agony the subject’s mind and body can tolerate.
In the administration’s program of "enhanced interrogation," this expertise was provided by doctors and psychologists — professionals who are supposed to heal and comfort. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights assembles the evidence and reaches a sickening but inescapable conclusion: "Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture."
Dwell on that for a moment, especially if you believe that the Bush administration’s decision to submit terrorism suspects to medieval interrogation practices was somehow justifiable — or even if you believe that torture was wrong, but that now we should "look forward" and pretend it never happened. This is how torture warps a society and distorts its values.
You tell me something that intricate and meticulously planned was just a few isolated incidents of rogue folks with no orders from the top of the chain of command. Or that we all don’t shoulder some of the responsibility for it happening in our names.
Or that there wasn’t a concerted effort to hide what we were doing because people knew it skirted legality.
Or that conduct like this helps the US instead of creating a more robust recruiting poster for the people we claim to be fighting against…all the while becoming them.
We have traded our liberty and our long-standing fight for human rights around the world for the deliberately hyped illusion of a little safety.
And we have forfeited our souls in the process.
Morning all. Do yourselves a favor and watch the video….