Greenwald on the Latest Torture Revelations
Glenn Greenwald, summing up quite succinctly why I fear for the future of my country: The latest revelations of lawbreaking, torture and extremism.
It has long been known that we are torturing, holding detainees in secret prisons beyond the reach of law and civilization, sending detainees to the worst human rights abusers to be tortured, and subjecting them ourselves to all sorts of treatment which both our own laws and the treaties to which we are a party plainly prohibit. None of this is new.
And we have decided, collectively as a country, to do nothing about that.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
With article after article coming out describing how the USA tortures and kills to extract ‘actionable intelligence’ it is no wonder the rest of the world views the shrubco junta as nothing more than your garden variety thugs.
And today’s news has the right-leaning supreme court rejecting to even hear the case of Khaled el-Masri. Who you might ask? The German citizen who was kidnapped, tortured and then – oops! – released, after we finally figured out we nabbed the wrong guy. Or that Canadian Maher Arar… there are thousands we never hear about (some of them now dead, oops!)
Also in today’s news former President Carter blasts the bushista junta for bringing America lower than the scum we are ‘fighting.’
Jan’09 can’t come soon enough. Impeach Cheney, then the idiot.
October 11th, 2007 at 5:28 am
IANAL, but since el-Masri isn’t an American citizen, so it’s not all that surprising that the Court would decline this, is it? Of course the lower court invoked the state secrets thing, which is unfortunate, but overall this just seems outside the purview of the US Federal Court system to me. You can’t blame this on a “conservative court” — there was no dissent.
I abhor extraordinary rendition as much as anybody here, but that means we must pass laws against engaging that kind of behavior outside our borders. It’s a legislative issue, and our legislature is failing to do its job.
October 29th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
One American woman’s personal response to witnessing the hell of torture was extreme. At least she won’t have nightmares for the rest of her life.
What makes this story even more interesting is the manner in which the truth came out – the moral of the story is not to beleive anything the military reports unless there is convincing corraborating evidence.
November 1st, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Not getting posted… so try this (copy & paste & replace the ” dot ” with “.”)
This article gets better the further one reads:
www dot rense.com/general78/waterboard.htm