Take the low road

One not familiar with things as they are today might think that military people would predominate in the group of those pushing for harsher treatment of prisoners of war, but the truth is, as the truth so often is these days, quite different from what people believe.

Having rejected the moral low road last Wednesday by rejecting many types of torture for (let’s call them what they are) Muslim prisoners, the Pentagon may be overridden by the criminals (let’s call them what they are) of the Bush administration, who despite George W. Bush’s clear and precise denial, long to be the Torquemada of the twenty first century. Not only does the proposal reinterpret the Geneva Conventions to allow the CIA to torture their victims, it would place any further attempts to take the red hot tongs out of the hands of the Holy Office beyond the reach of the courts. Take that, activist judges!

The argument that “This is a new kind of war” is an absolute lie, as is so much that emanates from the new Axis of Evil in Washington. Beyond the fact that confessions under torture are more likely to be useless or misleading, there has been no success that we know of in using it to good result.

According to the Times, A senior intelligence official said that the new legislation, if enacted, would make it clear that the techniques used by the C.I.A. on senior Qaeda members who had been held abroad in secret sites would not be prohibited and that interrogators who engaged in those practices, both in the past and in the future, would not face prosecution. The Adolph Mengeles of America need not fear and it’s not evil when we do it.

As much as the neanderthals like to speak of victory, there can be no victory in such an enterprise, only survival and even survival is in question if we mean survival as a nation with any right to talk about moral standards and leadership. While many of his supporters see George W. Bush as God’s own president and will thus support his atrocities as part of God’s great indecipherable plan, those free of this tribalist insanity are beginning to see quite the opposite in our leadership, who lie, murder, torture and steal to further their great and obvious plan and part of that plan is to make themselves immune to judgment by the courts. The judgment of the world and the judgment of whatever gods may be are quite another thing.