'Bushites set tone that led to torture'

[nostamj]

<snip>

The tone for this new gloves-off era was set by the White House itself, which has openly scorned the notion that prisoners in its "war on terror" have any rights. The whole purpose of building a special prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was clearly to put detainees beyond the reach of U.S. law.

Of course, the Geneva Conventions should have applied there; but the Bush administration simply announced that the detainees were "unlawful combatants" — a newly defined category of human being arbitrarily stripped of all legal rights by a country that, paradoxically, continued to bill itself as the world's leading democracy.

What possible reason would there be to hold prisoners in a law-free, offshore enclave except to do things to them that the law doesn't permit — including perhaps to "soften them up" before interrogations, to apply the very gloves-off treatment that Black set out to members of Congress as the new normal.

There was plenty of international outrage over this stance but, to a large extent, the U.S. media and intellectual community accepted it.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=16098

[readmylips]

1. Damn Right!...And we allowed ourselves to be called...

foking unpatriotic when what we saw was not christian, was not making America safer, and it was a total disgrace. We were the foking unpatriotic ones. The whole bunch of republican bastards labeled us unpatriotic. They paid the media to call us unpatriotic, to laugh at us for our civic duty and for our right to uprise against what we saw as totally wrong.

Bush wanted shock & awe, either you're with us or against us, unpatriotic, christian crusades, the UN irrelevant, irrelevant old Europe, no Geneva consequences against US soldiers, hard punishment for countries who did not joined his insane plans...on and on and on. Mr. bush....you got what you wanted. You have disgraced the name of the United States of America. We, The People, will throw your foking ass out of the White House, and may you and your foking criminal family rot in hell.

[Rageneau]

2. Ever since Reagan, we've been slowly turning into Nazis.

And we're almost there.