Republicans Oppose Basic American Values: "'If American life and values change radically because of the attacks,' ABC's Sam Donaldson wrote, ten days after 9/11, 'the terrorists will have won.'
... Incredible as it seems, these "Americans" actually approve of torture.
Talk radio king Rush Limbaugh, comparing the SS-style siccing of vicious German shepherds on Iraqi POWs to a fraternity initiation prank, led the charge of the torture apologists: "All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation--and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world." If cruelty is carefully calibrated to cultural mores, who cares whether it's wrong?
Besides, argues El Rushbaugh, the torturers were just funnin': "You ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?" Boys (and girls) will be (psycho) boys.
Days after articles of impeachment were introduced against him in the House of Representatives, the indefatigable Don Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that even now, even after Abu Ghraib, denying POWs sleep, starving them, subjecting them to painful "stress positions" and other forms of torture are still being inflicted upon inmates--guilty or innocent and always uncharged--throughout his Defense Department gulags.
... I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment [of Iraqi POWs]," spat Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a card-holding member of the Party of Lincoln, to fellow members of the Armed Services Committee. "You know, they're not there for traffic violations. They're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents."
Actually, according to the Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib, 90 percent of the detainees had been "arrested by mistake."
Inhofe's rant continued: "I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is not in charge of these prisons." Yup, that's no doubt the expression on their faces: gratitude.
... The fact that other human beings can conceive of miseries even crueler and more painful to inflict cannot exculpate us for the sins we commit. Is the robber less guilty because he can look down on the kidnapper? Shall we forgive Hitler for killing six million Jews if someone else kills seven? "
- posted by geoff @ #