Combating evil with evil, bad with bad, wrong with wrong seldom achieves anything but a further plummet into despair and disregard. Thus, masking as the moral strong road in the global war on militant Islam, some of this country's leaders took it upon themselves to completely deviate from the Geneva Convention and the regard for basic human dignity. Time is not on the side of those who made these atrocious and narrow minded decisions; men who have never picked up a weapon and fought for anything with their own two hands, but rather find no difficulty in sending so many others to die, and condoning cruel and unusual punishment of captives. These strong men, courageous with the lives of so many others, urban cowboys, will be found and charged with war crimes. Time is not on their side.
Nowhere should this treatment be acceptable; least of all the United States. This administration has deviated so drastically from the path of righteousness and serving the better interest of the citizens; it is hard to imagine how, and if, we will regain credibility in the greater world. We, the citizens of this nation, deserve better than this.
Yesterday, two of the architects of the torture in Guantanamo Bay came before the House of Representatives Subcommittee to testify; they said nothing; they held their tongues; they were a practice in evasiveness so obvious it literally made me laugh in disgust. David Addington and John Yoo represent fully the ideals of this administration. Yet their testimony received almost no press coverage; strange, considering prodigious international repercussions of their actions.
Scott Horton, a NY Human Rights Attorney, said, "By and large, it was an exercise in dodge ball with the two witnesses avoiding the questions."
From Today's NYTimes:
Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.
The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released — their lives ruined — without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All of the prisoners were men, and all were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick, the report said, and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him....The ostensible purpose of mistreating prisoners is to inflict pain and induce disorientation and despair, creating so much agony that the prisoners give up valuable intelligence in order to end the suffering. But torture is not an interrogation technique; it’s a criminal attack on a human being.
