"The Other Face Of Political Violence"---Charles Pierce

[KoKo]

Published on Tuesday, April 16, 2013 by Esquire
The Other Face Of Political Violence
by Charles P. Pierce

Likely lost amid all lachrymose coverage of the act of political violence in Boston yesterday will be the release of a magisterial, non-partisan report concerning the decade of political violence organized and executed by the American government, and concerning the subsequent shameful abandonment by the current administration of its affirmative moral obligation to let the American people know fully what had been done in their name, and too often with their tacit and overt consent, and the degree to which we are all complicit in outright extrajudicial barbarism.

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been "the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody." The study, by an 11-member panel convened by theConstitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.

The United States Of America tortured people. It tortured a lot of people. It lied about torturing people. It lied about torturing a lot of people. It tortured on its own, and it subcontracted the job to countries with more experience at it, since the United States never had made torture a policy before. Within the government, the theory and practiced of torture was discussed by a bunch of bloodthirsty legal aesthetes the banality of whom would have shocked Hannah Arendt. Godwin be damned, these were people who acted like tiny Heydrichs at their own personal Wannsee, and they dragged us all into a moral abyss with them because not enough of us cried "Stop!" loudly enough even to prevent the re-election of the president who'd countenanced it.

But the report's main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end. The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials' claims that they were not.

Simply put, the "government officials" were liars. I don't know when it became journalistic protocol to give the benefit of the doubt to people who lie to us, but that was not a good day for the First Amendment. But the final offense against democracy was not John Yoo's, or Dick Cheney's, or even that of old President C-Plus Augustus. It belongs to Barack Obama and his people.

MORE AT ESQUIRE and HERE:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/16-6

[Richardo]

1. I'm with Charlie

All the way down to and including the last sentence.

[tblue]

2. "the president who'd countenanced it"

Awful. Just unforgivable.

[n2doc]

3. Well, we had to look forward, not backward!

So, move on!

[Demo_Chris]

4. I suspect we are still doing it. nt

[enough]

5. k&r (nt)

[KoKo]

6. ...)